uber.la

So I can hear what you are saying, and I am thinking the same thing, "Why John, why… Another Twittertool, why?" And I have to answer, "I'm not sure, but…" And now I crack my sly grin and drill you with my beady eyes and say laugh, "CHECK THIS OUT!" It's kind of a trademark of enthusiasts! We're so stoked to find something new and cool. And if we can turn you on to it, well… Can you remember who first told you about the World Wide Web? I can. And I can count a number of people who heard about it from me. It was like what it must've been like when man landed on the moon. I was 1 year old and I promise I can remember the scene in the living room. Of course I'm fantasizing here… But I distinctly remember my friend Ben saying, "There's this thing, called the World Wide Web." I almost crashed the car as I reached to turn down the Elvis Costello CD…

Okay so check this out.

So Microplaza is this site that lets you group and sort your Twitter contacts in all kinds of cool ways. One of the main metaphors they use is the Tribe. And I happen to like that concept/term/meme. So it captured my imagination enough to play around with it for an hour or two. We'll see if in two weeks I am still using it, or if it is a post under the bridge, so to speak.

As you can see from the screenie above I have created a group call the "alivetribe." And if you come check it out you might find that I have already added you to this inner circle of tweeps. My inner circle of tweeps. And I have circles within circles. And now, what fascinated me while I was trying to build my tribes was the process and tags and tribes I actually came up with. Another process for building my own little taxonomy of friends and followers and even non-followers.

So I'm pretty sure Tara "wiffle girl" is not following me. [If you are Tara, can you ping me once in a while so I know you're still there...  ;-)  ] However, I can add Tara to my AliveTribe group simply because I follow her. That concept is kind of neat to me. So I went around building my "tribes" and adding various folks to them. And as you can imagine it was an evolving process. I would come upon a followee and try to put them in a tribe and if I didn't have a match, I would create a new one.

So here's the interesting part to me. In the quest to streamline the process of webwork, or speedtheweb, or GWD (getting webwork done) I like finding tools and seeing if they help or hender my process, my filtering, my categorization and capture. I have to do a review of Things as soon as I actually install and use it, but… Back to Microplaza.

So here are the tribes that I created as I was paging through Microplaza trying to get a clue as to how I might use it.

1. AliveTribe (112 inhabitants) This is my list of folks I follow with a careful eye. They embody the living social media experience for me. Brogan, Armano, Hunt…
2. AMD (1 inhabitant)
3. Apple (5 inhabitants)
4. Austin (25 inhabitants)
5. Bootstrap (1 inhabitant) Only one, because I have not had the time to add others. Bijoy is by himself next to that campfire.
6. Buzzie (0 inhabitants) my band – not sure how I'm going to use this one
7. Cats (12 inhabitants) the cats on twitter are amazing, this is part of my pettweets.org project
8. Dell (15 inhabitants) one a Dell-io, always a Dell-io.
9. Dogs (8 inhabitants) cause the woofs are funny too, not as wise as the cats, but still amusing
10. Eco (7 inhabitants) cause it's another good way to say green
11. Freak (0 inhabitants) as in freakin great, or freakin cool, or merry pranksterish cool
12. Green (8 inhabitants)
13. IA (1 inhabitant) where else do you put JJG
14. inSocialmedia (50 inhabitants) luminaries, perhaps not part of my AliveTribe
15. Media (12 inhabitants) all the press
16. Music (2 inhabitants) musicians, I thought I unfollowed Pete Yorn a while ago… Hmmm…
17. MyTribe (44 inhabitants) these are folks I hold dear to my heart
18. Ning (0 inhabitant) a placeholder for my Nings
19. Pettweets (20 inhabitants) cats and dogs living in together…
20. Posterous (0 inhabitant) a placeholder for my posterousse
21. Research (5 inhabitants) Gartner/Forrester/Radian6
22. RockBand (0 inhabitants) cause I'm a fanatic about RockBand
23. RoR (1 inhabitant) rails is the way, ruby is the base
24. Search (1 inhabitant) cause it's more than Google these days
25. Socialwiki (3 inhabitants) my open social project
26. Spirit (3 inhabitants) somehow I created spirit and spiritual… the program was flippin out or something
27. Spiritual (3 inhabitants) I will probably collapse this one into spirit, or maybe the other way around… hmm…
28. StartUp (1 inhabitant) so BiJoy should go in this one too
29. SXSW (3 inhabitants) the entire conferences not just interactive
30. SXSWi (15 inhabitants) my buds for the conferences
31. Tribe (16 inhabitants) not sure what the difference between Tribe and MyTribe is yet, might delete this one
32. Trust (14 inhabitants) my inner sanctum of trust, if you're in this group I can pretty much tell you anything and visa versa, really!
33. UI (1 inhabitants) more User Interface and User Experience folks
34. UnFollowFriday (0 inhabitants) cause I have a cause going here with Twitter DontFollowFriday.com
35. UX (3 inhabitants) JJG again, and more…
36. WordPress (3 inhabitants) because WordPress is the future and Code is Poetry
37. Writer (3 inhabitants) is writing poetry, is blogging poetry, what is poetry?
38. Code is Poetry (TBD)
39. Poetics (TBD)

And with that I see that I have to go back and create a poetics or poetry tribe. Cause language is more than just data, it can be beautiful.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/microplaza

Tags: alivetribe, beady eyes, circles within circles, communities, dontfollowfriday, dontfollowme, elvis costello, enthusiasts, followers, imagination, inner circle, jmacofearth, livingroom, making twitter better, metaphors, microplaza, mytribe, networks of trust, sly grin, tara, taxonomy, thinking the same thing, tools, tribal, tribal knowledge, tribe, tribes, trust, twitter, twitterfun, twitterjoker, wiffle, world wide web