One of the more interesting new third-party Twitter services to make an appearance this month is Twintro. This innovation from Robert Balousek offers a way to sample a featured Twitter member for a day.
Twintro introduces followers to one new member a day
At first view, I dismissed Twintro as purely a marketing gimmick, something only SEO consultants and those offering webinars would use. That’s not the case, however. Twintro is billed as a way to sample and explore interesting people without the higher barriers of manually finding, following and unfollowing new twitterers.
Finding interesting people on Twitter outside of your circle of friends is a problem for rookie and veteran users alike. Twintro solves this dilemma by bringing fascinating, amusing, and thought-provoking Twitterers to you. Twintro is a service built on top of Twitter, so it does not require you to sign up, log in, or visit this site.
There is great potential, too, for Twintro to become an intriguing new view of daily Twitter use that proves insightful for researchers and community managers.
To join, you must follow Twintro on Twitter. This is a requirement both to view the re-tweeted content as well as to receive direct message notification about being a featured twitterer. Every day for about 10 hours, Twintro retweets the day’s posts from different members. Anyone following Twintro or viewing the web site will get to peer into someone’s day.
Rob is the sole arbiter of who gets featured, giving the system a human filter to keep spam out of the shared channel. Twintro also plans to throttle the number of posts being sent each day, further guarding against spam.
In addition to offering your own tweets for a day, you can nominate others to featured with a simple @twintro reply with another Twitter member username.
My primary use of Twitter is as a mechanism to connect to my local community of Bloomington, Indiana. Twitter also offers great academic interest, with several Informatics projects developing around the platform. A surprisingly small percentage of those I follow turn out to be people I don’t know or who don’t live in my vicinity. Twintro, however, may become a “safe” way to stumble upon new connections outside of my small geographic and professional circle.
Today, I tracked Mauricio Balvanera‘s trip to a San Francisco dentist. Seven of his tweets were reposted on Twintro. I look forward to seeing who shows up in Twitterrific tomorrow.
