Maybe this exists and I just haven’t seen it yet (I think 4,000 new Twitter apps roll out every day, after all).
Twitter should embed intelligence to find/follow people who have similar interests. If I’m tweeting about microfinance, sustainable energy, entrepreneurship, etc. there should be a way to aggregate those keywords. (For an example of what this could look like, scroll down my page and see the rotating tag cloud in the right column).
Once aggregated, Twitter should recommend people to follow based on similar interests. That would be a great way to make connections and find resources that I’d otherwise have to search for manually. Not only should it factor in keywords, but the application could weigh existing connections as well (ie: friends of friends, “in-network” connections that are just waiting to happen).
If you know of something like this, tell me about it!
AfriGadget
Kiva
Great point Sadie. What do you think the benefits of other microblogging sites are? Are you using any of them? One of my clients is developing a social networking platform for immigrants and I think he’s nailing the concept: each group has its own unique identity in the physical world, and neither name brand nor white-box solutions seem to be catering to cultural differences (yet).
The hashtags are a poor-man’s approximation of this, but you do have to perform that manual search. Other, less popular microblogging communities do have a handle on that recommendation piece – Twitter just needs to catch up!