Most people when they see Twellow they think one of two things: the first is “this is a yellow page for Twitter” and the second is Twitter Web Directory. When I saw it the first time I thought so too and since both options are not so “sexy” I wasn’t excited. Recently, I look at Twellow again and this time I thought LinkedIn!

There is also something not too exciting (some even say boring) about LinkedIn, yet this is one of the most valuable tools on the web today. LinkedIn abstracts contact information using connections. If one of your friends changed his work, moved, got promoted, or started his own business it doesn’t require any effort keeping your records current. You don’t loose this contact and you are on top of significant events in his life. The shift from you editing all your friends’ contact information, to your friends keeping their own contact info up to date, is what that enabled scaling building address books to hundreds and even thousands of contacts (networking). Today, LinkedIn offers way more features than keeping contact information up to date and making new connections but the core value of this service is still the capability to maintain a large dynamic address book.

Where am I going with this? When it comes to the business there is nothing more valuable than keeping things organized. There is nothing that saves more time then having the data categorized and sub-categorized in one way or another (e.g. tables, directories, meta-data).  If I need to complete a business intelligent task I want to find the required information as quickly as possible (raw data) so I can proceed to the analysis phase. Organized data provides that capability. Sexy or not, this is when clicks count makes the difference.

Beyond categorization the business care about scalability and the main two methods that I’m aware of to scale operations are decentralization and adding another layer of abstraction (aka Virtualization). LinkedIn offers both as I explained above. Twellow only offers the later at this point.

I would claim that Twellow abstracts conversations within sectors/groups from the micro-bloggers (or lifestreamers). Twitter users can changed how they want to be categorized but if you already chose to listen to Discussions about Search Engines (RSS) your setup does not need to change. Twellow enables following an entire group of Twitter users under the same category and in this way to scale our ability to  listen to the web. It let us focus our ears (actually, in this case, our eyes) listening to a specific channel. Twitter “channels” is something that many voices on the web asked Twitter to provide for while now. Twellow does not let you create these groups today (centralization).

The What are people saying? feature was added recently as I discovered reading Twellow’s blog. For me, this fantastic capability made directories suddenly very attractive. Now, it is possible creating a Twellow tab on iGoogle or Netvibe Ginger (Ginger actually work better at this point) with multiple “Twellows”;  “What are people saying?”  RSS feeds. Cool, I just created a conversation dashboard showing Twitter updates organized by industries, sectors, categories. Now I only need to add backtype comments RSS feeds and I will almost, have an organized Web-now!

Why almost? First, because backtype is not organized yet around categories. The second reason is that my new dashboard is hard to use. Both iGoogle and Netvibe collapse the updates and I have to click on each one to see what is in it, this is very annoying. Actually, if you use Twellow What are people saying about Search Engines? page, it is quicker to read the updates from there because they are not collapsed. Yet, I want to see multiple of these on the same page. Maybe Twellow will let you create your own dashboard aggregating and organizing discussions from different categories using their web site.

Putting these two, Twellow and LinkedIn, on the same blog post led me to the following question. Should LinkedIn buy Twellow? Both services are valuable to the business. LinkedIn keeps your professional information up to date and Twellow keeps an organized stream of updates flowing. LinkedIn allows creation of new groups based on common interest and objectives, these new groups could be used by Twellow technology to gather updates from Twitter, hence new categories. I guess that you can say the same for Facebook, yet Facebook is not geared for professionals as LinkedIn is. Finally, I think that Twellow could add some spark to LinkedIn corporate like, look and feel.

Twellow can go alone too because it does not need to build the networking capability (i.e. adding connections). Twellow inherited its social graph from Twitter. Twellow knows who is high in rank – having lots of followers. Who is highly interactive – lots of incoming replies(@). Twellow bio now offers adding more social links (from 16 social networks) and the creation of an extended bio. Yet, I think that having both working together is an opportunity to offer unique solution to the business world.LinkedIn could also build the same capability on their own yet Twellow already has “505,248 people, and counting” scanned and categorized plus I don’t know how many subscribers (I’m one).

Alternatively, if Twellow opens their API I can see an interesting mashup using the two. Using group members from LinkedIn to create a new Twellow category for seeing what’s on this group member’s mind. Backtype + Twellow is another interesting combination.

To sum it up, both services are not something that is typically been used for casual web browsing. They are valuable tools for the business. They are time savers, monitoring services, business intelligent and development, networking, career builders and more tools.

Does it make sense for LinkedIn to acquire Twellow? Do you see more symbiotic relationships between the two? I will be happy to hear one way or another in the comments below.

By Keren Dagan

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.