The Return!

Kinda returned... Anyway, in January I came up an idea called "Wyttr"...

Messages on the microblog service Twitter evolved from being status updates on your day to becoming one-liners about the state of governance, technology, society, and even existence. The current Twitter community blossomed from a vibrant group of technology experts, social media mavens, would-be philosophers, and all-out ego-trippers, creating an atmosphere of unspoken competition around whose tweets can make one look the most intelligent or thoughtful. However, even a self-centered impetus can generate extremely innovative ideas. With so much “wit” present all throughout the Twitterverse, how can we catalog and share these poignant thoughts to the Internet as a whole?

Wytter comes into play as the aggregator of these points of ego-backed wisdom. Using a crowdsourced reputation and contribution system and reinforced by the strategic implementation of the Twitter API and mobile applications, Wyttr hopes to employ the Twitter community to identify, tag, share, and discuss these 140 character statements with the public. The tweets and their respective discussions should be easily referenced, linkable, and embeddable in order to overtly and virally expose these ideas to those new to and outside of Twitter.

That was January 2009.  And taken. I found this site: http://tweetingtoohard.com/ which just launched.  Luckily, In May 2009, I turned Wyttr into the Witty Twitter:

What if your news was fun, collaborative, and peer-produced? The Witty Twitter responds to the needs of the increasingly participatory news consumer by bringing the collective knowledge of the Twitter community together into a hyper-accessible and organized newspaper format. The site imports headlines from Google News and attaches relevant tweets to each topic. A robust recommendation system orders tweets by the community’s preference – tweets that receive the most “witty” ratings rise to the top, while the extraneous tweets fall into obscurity.

The Witty Twitter collects the products of Twitter’s collaborative and open user culture – alternative news sources, concise analyses, and breaking coverage – and displays them to all Internet users, even those without Twitter accounts. The site’s community dynamically regulates the order and visibility of tweets and populates content with comments and criticisms.

So, I'm incredibly lucky to change Wyttr to The Witty Twitter.  People pick up on ideas fast, especially when they concern Twitter.  Now help me pick a better name before it's too late :)