Insert Body Snatchers music here.

I don't think of lists as topical. Anyone who uses Twitter for five minutes knows topics vary wildly from one second to the next. Even if people try to group by topic, they're bound to be disappointed at times.

The point of the list is to showcase the people who loosely belong to the community around this team and/or blog.

I've actually warmed to hashtags for creating topics; they're frictionless and powerful. The #oow09 hashtag had tons of good content, but even then, some off-topic stuff.

I generally disagree that focus on people creates problems, since people do work. Sample any work environment, and you'll see tons of off-topic content. We need ways to filter out content, e.g. hashtags, search, etc.

The aforementioned Friends of AppsLab list presumably includes people whose interests are somewhat aligned with the AppsLab. Because of the diverse interests of the AppsLab – and because it is, after all, a lab – you would expect some level of leeway if you viewed the tweets created by the friends of the AppsLab.

For example, the fact that one of the AppsLab friends drank a banana split shake is, in a peculiar way, relevant. Oracle is, after all, an enterprise, and services such as FourSquare (the cited tweet was generated by FourSquare) suggest ways in which enterprises can engage their customers. This topic clearly falls within the realm of AppsLab interests.

But I challenge anyone who follows the “friends of AppsLab” tweets to find the relevance in this tweet (“it must take forever to film a hallmark channel movie. filming must stop for firefighters' day, millard fillmore's birthday…”). I feel sorry for the enterprise student who runs across that particular tweet in the AppsLab feed; the poor soul will end up invoking the former acronym for the Wisconsin Tourism Federation.

And the AppsLab list is a special case, because of its exploratory nature. What if someone were to set up a narrower list, such as “people interested in Oracle Database”? For that list, even a discussion of WebLogic may be considered off-topic.

While I know that social media is supposed to be all about people, in reality social media is also about topics that interest the people. For enterprises and enterprise workers to truly mine the information that is out there, we need better ways to do it. Following a person or a list of persons, while appropriate in a generic social media context, may not be appropriate in an enterprise social media context.

Unfortunately, our search tools aren't smart enough to do this at this time. I cannot think of a way to search Twitter for “AppsLab-y” tweets. When will our search tools become intelligent enough to distinguish “I just ate a mango” from “I just told FourSquare that I drank a mango shake at a local business”?

Insert Body Snatchers music here.

I don't think of lists as topical. Anyone who uses Twitter for five minutes knows topics vary wildly from one second to the next. Even if people try to group by topic, they're bound to be disappointed at times.

The point of the list is to showcase the people who loosely belong to the community around this team and/or blog.

I've actually warmed to hashtags for creating topics; they're frictionless and powerful. The #oow09 hashtag had tons of good content, but even then, some off-topic stuff.

I generally disagree that focus on people creates problems, since people do work. Sample any work environment, and you'll see tons of off-topic content. We need ways to filter out content, e.g. hashtags, search, etc.

The aforementioned Friends of AppsLab list presumably includes people whose interests are somewhat aligned with the AppsLab. Because of the diverse interests of the AppsLab – and because it is, after all, a lab – you would expect some level of leeway if you viewed the tweets created by the friends of the AppsLab.

For example, the fact that one of the AppsLab friends drank a banana split shake is, in a peculiar way, relevant. Oracle is, after all, an enterprise, and services such as FourSquare (the cited tweet was generated by FourSquare) suggest ways in which enterprises can engage their customers. This topic clearly falls within the realm of AppsLab interests.

But I challenge anyone who follows the “friends of AppsLab” tweets to find the relevance in this tweet (“it must take forever to film a hallmark channel movie. filming must stop for firefighters' day, millard fillmore's birthday…”). I feel sorry for the enterprise student who runs across that particular tweet in the AppsLab feed; the poor soul will end up invoking the former acronym for the Wisconsin Tourism Federation.

And the AppsLab list is a special case, because of its exploratory nature. What if someone were to set up a narrower list, such as “people interested in Oracle Database”? For that list, even a discussion of WebLogic may be considered off-topic.

While I know that social media is supposed to be all about people, in reality social media is also about topics that interest the people. For enterprises and enterprise workers to truly mine the information that is out there, we need better ways to do it. Following a person or a list of persons, while appropriate in a generic social media context, may not be appropriate in an enterprise social media context.

Unfortunately, our search tools aren't smart enough to do this at this time. I cannot think of a way to search Twitter for “AppsLab-y” tweets. When will our search tools become intelligent enough to distinguish “I just ate a mango” from “I just told FourSquare that I drank a mango shake at a local business”?