Microforums with Tweetworks?

If you haven't read about my microforum philosophy, look at the previous few posts to this one in this section aptly called "Microforums".

Case study: A social network on Ning with over 1,000 members. At least few hundred of them are active on Twitter. Many other people on Twitter might be interested in the professional group represented by the network without having heard of it yet.

What Twitter can do: Banter but no way to separate into subjects. Each person needs to go find and follow people and constantly update their list. Even then, during certain events where a lot of activity is not necessarily of interest to them, they need to unfollow some people and put them back later.

Laconica, while it's a nice project, does not appear to want to progress in the direction I am looking for. One of the most active threads on their mailing list is whether they should keep the name laconica or change it to the slightly better-known identi.ca, aka, "Twitter clone".

Yonkly can be installed for a price, the project seems to want to progress in user-suggested features, but it's based on .NET which is out of the question. We just don't run .NET servers and never probably will.

OpenMicroblogger.org is something that bears watching, but I'm not that keen on its best features (link and image posts built in), even though I see that some would want them. I'll need to revisit them soon.

I am trying Tweetworks "in desperation" because it looks like the closest thing to what I'd like to see as a point of departure. I don't really want a hosted system and even less one that depends on Twitter, but we must use the labs we can get to experiement.

Tweetworks may be obscured if Twitter introduces groups some day, and this seems to be inevitable. I hear the have them already in Japanese. Christopher Penn suggests using Yahoo Pipes to create Twitter Groups. Another site you can join organizes Twitter contacts into a group.

Missing features

Besides being hosted and built on Twitter, here are the problems I have with Tweetworks.

First, the option to post on Twitter at the same time is terrific, it's one of the best advantages of the standard used by laconica and openmicroblogger. The problem on Tweetworks is the interface and possibilities offered to control this. I suggest the option be made a toggle or that users be allowed to select the default action. That way if you feel inspired, you check the box for this one brilliant piece of 140 character universal wisdom and it is posted on Twitter. The rest of the time, your group discussion remains on Tweetworks only.

Second, unless it can be made to work with some existing clients like Twhirl and more importantly on smartphone (read iPhone), it won't lower the bar enough.

Third, and no one is doing this anywhere that I know of except on IRC, some kind of ignore function is needed. Maybe it needs to be better than just a single person ignore. Maybe "ignore this thread" is needed. Maybe "mute this person for 24 hours"? Whatever the exact functionality might be, in a community of hundreds or thousands, you will need to ignore one or more people sooner or later.

Finally, and I think this is one of the most original features in my scenario, ignore statistics.

In its simplest form, the admin can see these and possibly whisper something in the ear of the "offender". Possibly it would be of interest to show the number of people ignoring someone on their page along with following or favorites. And for the coup de grâce, a temporary mute action based on the ratio of followers to ignorers, configured by the admin. These features using ignore statistics are all optional. They can be compared to the rating phenomenon, started by Digg, replicated in many places but little used outside of Digg-like or bookmarking sites.