Example.

I was just reading a story on the Ft. Hood shootings in the CNN application on my iPod and saw a line in the middle of the story that said “Twitter list: Keep up with who we’re following“. Now, this is a strike against the CNN app, as the text didn’t link to anything. But even if it had, what would it link to? More than likely the @cnnbrk/fort-hood Twitter list, which was created specifically to follow that story.

How would I use this?

If it were linked in the story, it would bring up a Safari window showing the list on Twitter.com.

Safari isn’t my default Twitter reader on the iPod though, Tweetie is.

This isn’t iPod specific either, this is web application specific. If I were looking at the CNN story in Chrome or Firefox, there is currently no way for me to tell the browser that clicking on a Twitter.com link should bring me to Brizzly to read it.

It would be very cool if there was a way for users to specify this type of cross-connection between apps.

I’m betting this is something that could be solved relatively easy in the PC browser world through extensions, but at this point can’t see it even be approached in the strict Apple app development world. At some point, we will realize the need to start treating web applications more like desktop applications in that users will want to leave one to visit another at times as part of their natural application flow.

New User Signup: Anybody can now sign up for their own TopTwit Top 40 page. All you need to enter is your Twitter username, Trim username, Trim password, and Disqus shortname. I will fully admit that I’ve been coding quick, so I don’t have the checks and balances coded and you can pretty much enter whatever the heck you want for everything and who knows what will happen. But if you enter valid info for the above stuff, you will have access to all the features thus far. You can probably skip the Disqus info if you don’t care about comments. Also note that until I get things dynamic enough, you’ll only have a pretty URL if you tell me in advance that you’re coming. Otherwise you will still work fine, but the URL just won’t be as fun.

Comments Are Enabled: I just added Disqus comments to all the tweets that are captured. You can click on the comment count to go to a page specifically built for the tweet and comment there if you would like. I’m still thinking out smarter ways to go about this, but it looks pretty cool.

Trim, Postly, Bitly All Work: The page is designed around Tr.im because their API has a cool feature to grab the visit count on the last X urls posted, saving a lot of time when refreshing the data every 5 minutes. However, you can still get the view count from post.ly (the Posterous url shortner and bit.ly, so I do. Bugs are always possible of course and I haven’t read into the bitly API enough, but I may need to have you enter a bit.ly api key at some point.

Broken Stuff: Of course there’s broken stuff because I’m the only one using the site and nobody’s complained about the broken stuff yet. Specifically the detection of URLs that you retweet but are from other people – those stats don’t show up the best and I’ll need to get some owner checking going on at some point. Also, reposting old urls does not refresh the age at this point, which would be kind of a nice feature in the future.

What else: That’s it. Please sign up and have some fun. It’s your own little personal Twitter Digg if you hadn’t thought of it that way yet. And if you hadn’t seen it already, this all exists because of Dave Winer and his challenge to have some fun after he made the first top40 app. So thanks to him because it has been fun.

Twitter has long been talked about as a news source. If it ever decides to work as a news source, or if we ever decide to actually use it as one, there will be two parts:

1. The raw news will be complete madness, and everybody will be allowed in.
2. Many somebodies, from many different groups and interests, will harness the madness into usefulness.

This is easier (ha) than it sounds.

Six degrees of separation, or something similar to that, will determine that I as an editor/publisher can choose my trusted raw news sources that cover my area of interest. If I’m looking for local news in my town of 30,000, I only need a handful of trusted sources sending out raw news in order for me to edit/publish an aggregation of news for that locality. A larger city (Chicago) only requires a handful more sources.

For edit/publishing tasks, I will have a way to strip out tweets that are unrelated from that stream and a way to categorize the tweets that are related. Once a category (story) has valuable information from enough sources, it will be published. Once published, it remains alive. I can remove/add information and sources. Everyone can react, republish, comment, or do whatever they would like with that story.

More later I think. I might be working on it.

The original TopTwit has pretty much failed for the time being, but that doesn’t mean the idea is dead. Soon I’ll head back into that code and clean it up (a year later). It does still work if you want to try it out– sign up and build your twit lists and you have a nice page to keep track of your favorites.

On the other side of things, I’ve been having fun playing copycat to the 40 most recent links from @davewiner. You can see my version over at 40 most recent links from @jeremyfelt. I’ve recently added support for bit.ly and post.ly in addition to the default tr.im functions. I have categories built in (using hash tags), but I took them off of the display for now because it seemed like a waste of characters. Not sure what new features will show up here in the near future, but it definitely needs a design overhaul.

I immediately got to work, registered the domain, and pounded out the site. TopTwit.com is the result of that work. It’s fairly basic right now, but pretty easy as well. You can sign up for an account, add the Twitter users that you want to follow, and then go to the front page and browse through each user’s last 5 tweets to the world.

A full writeup explaining everything is available on my TopTwit page. Please comment there or here with any feedback that you have. I’ll be adding more features and tweaking throughout the week.