With the arrival of David Sifry's "Announcing Hoosgot" service on twitter (see also Doc Searles' "Y Hoosgot?") folk have started talking about the whole #tagging and grouping thang again (Not ignoring HashTags, another dandy service) ... and this really deserves to be talked through.

These two posts pretty much capture the state of things in the summer of '07: "Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels" and, at ITtoolbox, ELSUA's "Groups for Twitter; or a Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels and on the Importance of Listening to Your End-Users" - As a starter, people keep coming up with some pretty impressive blog posts that clearly detail how Twitter could be used on a business environment to help you stay connected with other knowledge workers while in a distributed world.

Looking at how folk use Twitter got me remembering group dynamics in PowWow. (You had to be there; systems in-form transaction, yes? This system truly enabled friendly fun camp-fire style exchanges.)

I've been chewing on this for a few days ... reading posts that link to this one hear ... letting it simmer a while.

I think I've got a model that would work. It doesn't use tags, it would be by subscription. Sort of. It's so simple it's sort of embarrassing.

You know how many different view we have now. "Recent" (http://twitter.com/home) of course shows yours and everyone you're following. Then "Archive", your past tweets ... again self-evident. And "Replies", which is awefull nice ... most everyone misses @ traffic now and again. Then there's "Direct Messages" ... gotta luv systems that have simple PM Function.

And, equally obvious, you can go to anyone else' page to see their past tweets. Not their "Direct" of course, nor their "Replies" ... common decency.
Put here's the curve: "With Others" ... ok, I can see my buddies' view of his transaction ... not so interesting.

Ah-Ha! - a group could congregate on a single account! If folk "Follow" that "group user", then they would see it and all others subscribed to it.
What's interesting is that the plumbing imposes open-ness ... not tweets can be directed to only that group, and non-members are perfectly capable of viewing the whole record. But "viewers" can not contribute to that stream; an individual isn't "voiced" until/unless the group user Follows them! And, of course, an individual can be de-voiced. (Yes, of course "with cause" ... having tools doesn't mean we shed all the problematics of the human experience!

Addendum: I was wondering >> ITGeek: "Hoosgot insight for "advantage to actually following" me? My Follows already create the group. To what use my "Followers" list?"
I got it: By "Following" ITGreek, a person promotes their own Tweets, i.e. that gesture signals a request to have feed added to group view!