Tweeght is a new site described by it’s creator as offering Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ – although the voting is actual more like Reddit with a simple up or down arrow.
Tweeght - new ranking site for Twitter
It was built by Aditya Kothadiya in under a week, and is pretty simple to use. You can either post a tweet by submitting it on the site, which requires your Twitter username and password, tag Tweets with #tweeght, #thought, or #quote, or send the Tweet to @tweeght.
From the site, you can vote individual messages up or down, Retweet them, or reply – and there’s a Leaderboard of the most popular users.
Aditya says “The goal was to launch something quickly but it should be valuable, usable, beautiful and dead simple.” And you can follow Aditya at @adityakothadiya.
It’s definitely a nicely designed site, but is the timing right?
Previous attempts at social ranking sites for Twitter I previously covered, included Microblogging.com and Dwigger. Both have closed, with Dwigger shut for good, and Microblogging hinting that a new service will appear in the future.
Now I’m not the biggest fan of Digg, but I do see the value on social ranking/aggregation sites. I’m a reasonably frequent user of Stumbleupon, and I do use Delicious (although I’m taking a break until I can sort out my messy tagging!).
But I can see two major problems for this approach to filtering Twitter -
1. The scale of Twitter is hard to accurately judge, but the most generous estimates would put Twitter as a whole under the size of Digg’s monthly active users.
2. Social aggregation sites are useful for filtering the entire internet – over 133 million blogs monitored by Technorati, for example, plus mainstream media sites, video, images etc, etc. Has Twitter reached the point where it needs filtering in this way?
3. The ranking approach always involves viewing messages via an external site, taking you out of Twitter or your client. When you’re using Digg, Delicious or SU, you’re inside that community, whereas with Tweeght you need to have a seperate browser tab or window taking you out of the community stream to see what’s being rated.
4. Twitter is built on personal relevance and connections. I can’t help feeling that external ranking systems are a little web 1.0 for adding value. Would I rather see thoughtful tweets from people I’ve never contacted or followed, or would I rather see what my friends and contacts are saying, and have them highlighting anything they see which is thoughtful or brilliant.
That all said, Tweeght might have come along at the right time, with the recent huge rise in users driven by mainstream media coverage of Twitter – and some of those new users could be the Digg-type audience Tweeght needs. After all, Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for success being hugely dictated by factors such as timing his recent book Outliers.
