How to share your Twitter group

Back in January 2009, I started to gather together science types among my twitter friends and followers; I called them Scientwists. By the summer there were well over 500 on the list and a similar number in the associated scientist Twibe I built too.

Unfortunately, a Wordpress page with a list of 500 twitter users, their bios, avatars, and links is an unwieldy entity to edit and update and pretty soon, the growing list of Scientwists had gaps where users had changed avatars, a few dead links, and lots of out of date bios.

Then, my good friend Mila (known as milagro88 on Twitter) mentioned TweepML.org. This site lets you create lists of Twitter users that you can then promote on your own site. They stay up to date without intervention and only require a list of Twitter IDs rather than all the various fields (avatar, bio, link, ID) from each user.

Almost more important than any of that is that these lists are active. Each user has a check box next to their ID and you can pick and choose a selection from each list and then via a quick login to Twitter (they really should be using OAuth for security reasons though) you can follow members of the list.

So, check out the Scientwists list on Sciencebase.com. It’s split into 6 lists, almost randomly ordered, each with 100 members (100 limit it TweepML’s limit not mine). There, you can find new Twitter users with a scientwific bent: scientists, science librarians, science communicators, and other science types.