A pretty significant problem with Twitter is that if you don't catch a tweet right then the chances are that it'll be lost into the torrent of new tweets, never to be seen again. All of which is far from ideal, either from a readers point of view or a tweeters point of view.
That makes the news today that Twitter has reached a deal to buy both the team and the technology at RestEngine very interesting. If you're not familiar with RestEngine, they're a company that provide email marketing services. Lest we forget, Twitter also bought Summify recently, so that purchase could help you create a digest of your best tweets, with the RestEngine technology then used to email your followers with your best bits.
This is the statement on the RestEngine homepage
“We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two and half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph. It’s been an incredible journey where we had the opportunity to work with some of the leading social app publishers. With our customers, we’ve iterated on our social marketing automation platform while defining a new set of best practices for this brand new world of outbound social marketing. We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.”
This would provide users with a nice digest feature, whilst maintaining the constant stream of tweets for which Twitter is famous. Summify and RestEngine could help it accomplish this through the email medium rather than cluttering Twitter’s clean interface. Those emails could show the most retweeted, @replied, or favorited tweets by people you follow.
Services like Paper.li have shown the popularity and demand for these kind of services, so it will be interesting to see what the new team can come up with.
Nice blog upgrade. like the look and feel. this is a good idea. i've got a blog post that has all my tweets including ones i'm contemplating but the email would be a lot better.
http://leader-leader.com/blog/2012/01/10/in/
Thanks David, hopefully it's a wee bit easier to read now. A digest would be a useful feature. It certainly works well on LinkedIn.
Is your blog based digest quite labour intensive to put together?
This would be really useful. I mean who has time to sit on Twitter all day waiting for something to come to them? This is a much better approach as the best tweets then come to you.
It's gone live everyone.
http://blog.twitter.com/2012/05/best-of-twitter-i…
To access it you go to https://twitter.com/settings/notifications and set your preferences.
Anyone who has used summify will know how brilliant it is. This is about curation and discovering relevant content.
Even just a summary email every few days with all the tweets, grouped by either person or conversation would be pretty handy. I find it a bit of a pain to try and track conversations when scrolling in reverse order (latest at the top to oldest at the bottom).
I received one of these emails today. Nearly all the tweets linked to stories that were out of date — which isn’t too surprising, since most tweets get “stale” within an hour or two, and this is a “weekly digest.” Seems like a tough problem for Twitter to solve.
That will be the problem John. One of the main benefits of Twitter is that it is very instant and therefore very timely. If you lose that you can often get better depth and detail from more traditional sources. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
I think this could be useful. I don't have time to sit on Twitter all day in the hope that something comes along that's interesting. A summary via email would be much better.
It might be a bit better if it were daily emails, as John said, most tweets will be stale if they were sent on a weekly basis.