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Sometime ago I wrote a blog post suggesting changes to Twitter search that would allow us to learn and mobilize resources in order to reach our goals faster. Eric Jensen from Twitter Search commented on that post, saying that he does believe that context and metadata are important to twitter search, and the social graph is a part of that. Not sure if that means my twitter wish list is currently in the making by the folks at twitter search.

In the mean time the only way you can learn and mobilize resources for your goals faster is to continuously find and follow interesting tweeple. Over the last two weeks I have been exploring different tweeple search tools. Some of which have been quite effective.

Tweeple search tools tend to fall in the following categories: directories, recommendation engines, who tweets on popular trends, and fun twitter graph visualizations. Since  a comprehensive review of each category would mean a very long post this is the first in a series of posts about tweeple search tools. In this first post I am providing a brief description of Twitter directories along with each directory’s method of finding and categorizing tweeple.

Wefollow

True to its tagline Wefollow is a true user powered Twitter directory, founded by Digg founder Kevin Rose. Anyone with a twitter ID can add themselves to Wefollow and tag themselves in a maximum of three categories. Obviously the quality of the tweeple you follow is dependent on how they see and categorize themselves. Their criteria may not match yours or those of others in the directory.

That being said great ideas often come from collaboration and exchange. Who better to do that with that those tweeple who are actively seeking and maintaining their twitter relationships.I have also found many whales (see link for definition) on wefollow which is probably a testament to its popularity. Overall a great tool to find others interested in the same things as you.

Justtweetit

Like wefollow Justtweetit is also a user driver twitter directory. I’ve found some top quality tweeters here who aren’t necessarily whales but where the learning and conversation has been very high quality. In fact its harder to find whales, at least very large social media and technology whales on Justtweetit compared to Wefollow.

Twellow

According to their website Twellow finds and categorizes tweeters according to their daily tweets. I sent a tweet to Twellow to find out what their categorization logic is. My guess is that like most search services they probably won’t share. If they do I will update you by the comments in this post.

There are times when you can come across tweeters who are uncategorized in Twellow. While there is an option to categorize yourself if this happens to you, the steps you need to take for doing this are not very intuitive. That being said I have found some high quality tweeters for different categories.

I would not recommend the Twellowhood feature which is supposed to help you search by geography. I don’t think it helps your search in any way. It doesn’t have a helpful map visualization and neither does it let you search by neighborhoods within cities. You might as well stick to Twitter advanced search or searching twitter through Google if you really want to search for geographically specific tweeple.

Twibs.com

Twibs is a user powered directory for businesses on twitter. You can add twitter business accounts for your own business or those of others. I did a quick search of twibs for technology and found a lot of technology news sources but very few startups. This directory is new, though older than wefollow. It may be that its entering a new space of categorizing businesses on twitter which fewer folks are interested in. In any case its smaller size makes its usefulness limited, at least for now.

Feel free to use this list as a starting point for your own experimentation. Let me know what your impressions are of each directory and what kinds of results you get with them.

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