There’s a positive and negative to everything, and one of the negatives to Twitter remaining as simple and open and bloatless as it is, is that it can get very hard to follow Twitter conversations and keep a tap on who-started-what-discussion and who-responded-to-which-tweet-which-responded-to-the-discussion-starter. You get the idea. Quotably is a new service that tries to solve this problem for all Twitterfolk.
If you’ve used API-based services like Digg Suggest before, Quotably will seem familiar. You enter your (or a) Twitter username, and up come all the conversations and discussions that person started, and took a part in on Twitter. The tweets are organized in threads, much like comments on Reddit or a discussion board.
For some of the featured Twitter users and to get an idea of what the service looks like if you don’t use Twitter, check out the Quotably pages on Chris Pirillo, Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and Veronica Belmont. And if you’re already a Quotably user, you can follow Quotably on Twitter to get the latest updates on feature releases.
The way I look at it, Twitter a huge 3-Dimensional world, and a service like Quotably gives you some 3-D glasses to look through. Sure, it’s possible to do without — you’re not going to be blinded without it — but to get perspective and see the big picture and the complete experience, it helps if you’re wearing them.
What I’d really love from Quotably, or anyone else for that matter, is a leaderboard for the Twitter conversations of the day. A lot of times, memes and interesting discussions are spread by a small community of users (like the Twitter Color Wars) and the only way I’m acquainted by them is by going through the tweets of the people I follow and trying to get a sense of it. Instead, I’d love to get the “Top 10 Twitter Conversations for Today” (by length/number of replies or otherwise) and just read through it in my daily coffee break.
