Finding Fellow Tweeters

Whether you are interested in e-learning or little league baseball, there are people out there who want to talk to you...whether you know it or not. Fortunately, there are some tools that will help you find each other so you can wile away the wee hours talking about things that nobody outside your virtual circles could quite possibly be interested in.

Here are some of the tools that bring like-minded Tweeters together:

Twellow - one of my personal favorites, this tool quickly returns lists based on location, industry, and keyword search, and lets you follow with a click. While I haven't personally used it for prospecting, it looks promising for that purpose.

Nearby Tweets - lets you find Tweeple near you...or anywhere really.

TwitterPacks - find Twitter groups by interest.

TwitterLocal - an Adobe AIR application that lets you filter tweets by location.

TweetMondo - cool visual application with a map (I like gadgety stuff)

ChirpCity - city-specific tweets and tweeple...good for a quick peak at the local twittersphere

Local Tweeps - find and get found

Another great way to find other Tweeters is by the conversation.

TweetChat - lets you follow any conversation by its hash tag.

Tweetbeep - gives you Twitter alerts by e-mail when conversations mention you, your company, your products...or anything else; so if you're tracking a hot topic, like "spot learning", you can find out who else is talking about it...quickly.

Social Certification

Great posting over at Search Engine Watch by Erik Qualman in which he describes key statistics from Social Media.



One of the implications is that we ultimately will see a change in the construction of learning content from being centered around institutional processes to evolving out of individual and socially collaborative processes. And perhaps we'll even how some certifications are granted.

Imagine, if you will, a social certification of sorts where individuals rate others on special competencies. Say, for example, you do some killer SEO work for me and I give you a 5-star rating. Why wouldn't that rating be more relevant than your MEd from Indiana...at least as it relates to SEO work.

I'm not saying certificates are bad; I'm just thinking the world is moving too fast for anything but the social internet to keep up with the changes, and if I want a Google Wave-proficient programmer, there's no way today to be sure I'm getting one aside from the certification of experience.

In the meantime, I advise you to get your portfolio updated; until we standard of social certification, that may be the best viable alternative. It's less and less about who you are and more and more about what you've done. And in the social web, it's virtually always about who you know knows you.