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Introducing ICT4D Africa Twitters List for FollowFriday

By Wayan Vota on October 30, 2009

On the social networking site Twitter, there are many people who talk about ICT4D, and many who talk about Africa. But there are few who talk only and consistently about IC4D in Africa. So to try and cut through the clutter and hone in on the relevant voices for ICTworks, back in August I started a FollowFriday list in the ICTworks Network.

While that effort did find a few new voices, it wasn’t very effective at sharing these voices with others. Then just yesterday, Twitter turned on a “list” functionality – you can now make your own lists of Twitter people, and share this list with others. And now we have:

@ICT_works/ICT4D-Africa-Twitters

You can now follow ICTworks’s ICT4D Africa Twitters list in Twitter, which will give you a high-quality, real-time understanding of what is happening in Africa around information and communication technologies for development.

But by no means is this list fixed – members may come and go, depending on their focus and tweet quality. If you know of others that we should follow, please let me know. Self-referral is okay too – just add yourself in the comments below.

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Wayan Vota co-founded ICTworks. He also co-founded Technology Salon, MERL Tech, ICTforAg, ICT4Djobs, ICT4Drinks, JadedAid, Kurante, OLPC News and a few other things. Opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of his employer, any of its entities, or any ICTWorks sponsor.
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3 Comments to “Introducing ICT4D Africa Twitters List for FollowFriday”

  1. Tobias Eigen says:

    Thanks for this post, and for the list! I’m loving twitter lists, which I just gained access to today. Please consider adding @kabissa to your list.

    I have a few lists going in the same general area of interest as yours and am excited about them – but am finding that they would be even more powerful if I could filter lists further by using “and” urls – just tested it and it didn’t work of course.

    So to take a few examples:

    http://twitter.com/kabissa/technology
    http://twitter.com/kabissa/development
    http://twitter.com/kabissa/africa

    Wouldn’t it be handy to be able to just see the twitterers that tweet about these three topics, using a URL like this:

    http://twitter.com/kabissa/twitter+development+africa

    I also have a list going for twitterers that I find interesting that I want to check every day. Wouldn’t it be nice to filter by that list as well…

    Let me know if you’ve figured this out. If the above isn’t possible yet, I’m sure somebody’s working on a widget to make it happen.

    Another interesting side effect for me of twitter lists is that I’m rediscovering the twitter.com website and liking the experience – otherwise I use the nambu twitter app which does not yet support lists.

    And a final thought – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to “crowdsource” twitter lists, so that you wouldn’t have to depend on the judgment of one person alone to know definitively who are the most useful sources on twitter for a given topic.

    Cheers,

    Tobias

  2. Wayan Vota says:

    Tobais,

    I have to disagree with your ICT4D Twitter list improvements. I like that there needs to be a human curator and that we can micro-target them to be very precise. Personally, I do not want a http://twitter.com/kabissa/technology+development+africa list. I want what we developed with the ICTworks ICT4D+Africa list. A very targeted group.

    Now cool would be RSS of list Tweets, so I could have that embedded into ICTworks.

  3. Tobias Eigen says:

    Hi Wayan – funny, never saw this reply back in November.

    The great thing about twitter is that both of our desires re lists will be met sooner or later.. we can have it all. 🙂

    Personally, I have found that Kabissa lists are great for three things:

    1) to acknowledge/honor tweeps without having to follow them myself every day
    2) to occasionally review and see what people are saying in an area that I care about (and here I’d like to be able to filter eg africa+socialmedia to see who is in both of those groups
    3) to give others the opportunity to, on occasion, view into my own research and the tweeps that I think are worth following in various areas

    Cheers,

    Tobias