Nov 2, 2009

Scientists on Twitter

Posted in Science at 2:03 pm by David Bradley -- 14 Comments; add your comment

Regulars will know that I’ve compiled and recompiled lists of science types on Twitter for mutual benefit. It started out as a list of 100 of my own Twitter friends back in January 2009, who happened to be in science and gradually grew to well over 600 members by November 2009.

However, just as I migrated the old manual list to Tweepml.org to help automate bio and avatar updates, Twitter announced the release of its own lists system. As far as I can tell Twitter lists are now public knowledge (I no longer see the request not to tweet about it).

As such, I’ve been gradually adding the scientwists to my own twitter list. Creating such a list doesn’t seem to have as many advantages as the Tweepml system, but worth doing nevertheless. It does. however, offer users a way to share their “filtered” lists with others. So, view that stream for tweets only from science types.

Unfortunately, Twitter lists have a limit of 500 members per list. You can create 20 lists per account, but rather than breaking the main scientwists list in two, I plan to simply not add those members of my original list if they fail to meet certain criteria.

I will continue to add any science types who ask, to the original scientwists list now running under Tweepml. But, if you have protected updates, I won’t migrate you to the new scientwist Twitter list. Equally, if you express only a passing interest in science rather than actually working with science in some capacity (research, librarian, science writer etc), then I will add you only to the Tweepml version.

Finally, if you don’t follow me, and I don’t follow you, then I won’t be adding you to the scientwist list on Twitter, although you can still be listed on my Tweepml list.

Twitter lists offer yet another metric for those who worry about such things to
focus on. On how many lists are you listed?