Twitter Needs Groups (But It Doesn't Have Them, So I Took Matters Into My Own Hands) [Updated With New Info 05/23/08 and Again 05/25]

[If you are arriving at this post from a link promising to show you all the Copyblogger Twitter Writing contest entries in one place, you might as well click over here to read the most recent post with the up-to-date information, and to see the flashy new slideshows. If you're just trying to read and I'm getting in your way, I apologize, proceed.]

Earlier this week, one of my favourite sites, Copyblogger announced a really cool contest - a writing competition held completely on Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that has the web abuzz. From the post:

Can you tell a story in exactly 140 characters? That’s the idea behind the first ever @copyblogger Twitter writing contest. It should be a great exercise and a lot of fun. Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation.

You see, Twitter limits all "tweets" (or mini-posts) to 140 characters or less (the same as the length of a standard text message, if you were wondering), so holding the contest on that service really forces all entrants to put their minds to work and filter their thoughts into one very brief nugget.

I had stayed away from Twitter until this week, but the contest so piqued my interest that I caved in,  set up an account of my own (you can also see my most recent activity in a new widget at the bottom of my sidebar) and submitted my own entry:

We all expected nuclear war, epidemics, melted ice caps. But poisoning by plastic? A childless world? We had no contingency plan for that.

Ooh, I know, the suspense! (Actually that's a bit of a nut graph of that novel I'm working on, slowly and steadily. And by nut graph I mean that's all I've written so far [Kidding.])

There are many great stories in the queue so far, but one of my favourites is this clever (and funny) quip by Andy Roberts, which is also pictured on the top of this post. [His Twitter profile here, his excellent blog here.]:

I feel my neighbours make far too much fuss about their precious lawns and flower borders. So stealthily from my side, I grow weeds at them.

In addition to the glory, the winner will receive an 4GB Ipod Nano [Update: the prize has been significantly upgraded, plus 2nd and 3rd prizes added] , so if you fancy yourself a writer and want to give it a try, head over to Twitter and register, then write your story and post a link to it in the comments on the Copyblogger article. 

OK But What's All That About Twitter Needing Groups?

Overall, I have found Twitter to be a fun and interesting way of interacting online, as well as a great way of passing along and picking up interesting links. But one shortcoming I did notice (aside from the fact that its servers keep going down too often) was the lack of any sort of Group functionality.

If you've been over to the Copyblogger site, you'll know that there are over 455 entries to the contest so far. And to read them all (or even a few of them) requires a grueling session of clicking back and forth between the post and the individual Twitter links. 

If only there was some way to add your Tweets to a Copyblogger Twitter Contest Group, for example. Then you could just hop onto the group and view all the entries easily in one place. 

Even a tagging option would work here - have everyone tag (or label) their post "Copytwitter" or something, and then a simple search for that tag would accomplish the same thing.

But alas, at least as far as my rookie eyes can tell, there is no way to do either of these things. So, after hearing that fellow Twitterer Andy Roberts was growing frustrated about the same issue, I decided to try and do something about it.

My (Pretty-Darn-Good-If-I-Do-Say-So-Myself) Makeshift Solution 

Last night, I pondered how these scattered links might somehow be aggregated and made convenient. First, I tried scraping the post to create a custom RSS feed, but FeedYes (which has worked very well for me in the past) wouldn't recognize any links in the comments. Then I tried using a few different email-to-RSS converters to convert that email thread I'm getting from Copyblogger advising of me each new entry into a public feed... but again, no dice.

So finally, I decided to go old school. Well, as old school as aggregating Twitter links by hand and posting them to a social bookmarking service can be considered (which I suppose, isn't very, but I digress.)

So I loaded up Firefox and using the Tab Mix Plus Extension, set new links to open in a new tab without switching focus. And then, yes, I manually went through and clicked every single link in that post until I had hundreds of tabs open in FF (I should have taken a screenshot, in hindsight, but alas, I did not.)  

Once all the links were open in tabs, I used Firefox's built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" function to create a folder containing them all.

Then, using social bookmarking site Diigo (which was recommended to me by Linden over at Linden's Pensieve),  I imported the bookmarks folder, put them all in a list called CopyTwitter and thought I was done.

But finally,  I was delighted to see that Diigo would do me one better than a list of links: a feature called WebSlides gave me a link that will let you all view every single entry (to date) in the Copyblogger contest in a really cool slideshow! [See Update Below]

So without further ado, here is my gift to you: CopyTwitter. Head over and have a good little read (or 455 of them and counting, if you like.)

[UPDATE: So it seems Twitter is dying again. In case it wasn't obvious, the slide show will only work when Twitter is fully operational. As of right now some of the slides appear and others do not because of Twitter issues. Hopefully they get their stuff together sooner rather than later. 

Twitter is back up now (albeit sluggish), but the Diigo slideshow is only showing slides 1-150 of 455 [Note: I have added the Thursday and Friday entries now as well]; the Diigo team has assured me they are working to fix it. In the meantime, if you prefer a simple list to slides, you can see that here, and it allows you to preview each one so it's still faster than reading many comments on Copyblogger. 

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Or if you really want to view all the links in a slick slideshow that works, click over to my updated post with embedded widgets here.]

I will continue to add new links manually to the slideshow until the contest ends on Friday. If I've missed any, please let me know in the comments and I will make sure to add them as well. 

As always, if you have any responses, questions or suggestions, I'd love to hear them in the comments. 

And if you liked this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed using the big Orange button at the top of my blog - hope to see you back again!