Thursday, May 1, 2008

Higher Ed Crowd Status Update

A few weeks ago, I started the Higher Ed Crowd Status Twitter group at crowdstatus.com. Since then, the crowd has grown to 32 higher ed Twitterers on board. The crowd has been a great way for new Higher Ed Twitter users to find other Higher Ed Twitter users, but it hasn't really gone beyond that.

Based on my uses of the site, I found a few items that would make it more useful and engaging:

  1. Auto-refresh. By using AJAX to gather the latest tweets by the group, I could continually monitor and participate in the latest conversations.
  2. Trimmed down interface. While the current interface is visually appealing, it would be nice to compact more in an attempt to get more tweets above the fold. In my browser, I see less than a quarter of the tweets for this group.
  3. RSS. It would be nice to take the tweets from this group and be able to read and stay updated through my other RSS feeds.
As I added the latest user today (@LisaNAU), I noticed that the site has been updated to accommodate my first request. Near the bottom of the page, is a link to start/stop "Auto refresh." By turning starting this, the site will automatically refresh with the latest tweets on a regular interval (it appears to be every minute).

You can check it out at:
http://crowdstatus.com/HigherEdcrowd.aspx

And if you would like to be part of the group, simply leave me a comment.

Thanks!