Nambu: Getting closer to twitter for everyone

Although this post will not go extremely in depth into the pedagogical implications of twitter, it will take a look at a new Twitter application called Nambu and explore whether or not it is getting us closer to a view of twitter that has less and less to do with friends, and more and more to do with search.

So, for the past few months, I have been explaining twitter to those who are uninitiated, as the best search engine that you aren’t using. I describe how google is a search of the past, and how twitter searches what is happening right now. We go into how that can be good and bad, and we eventually come around to a discussion of “what would you look for if you believed that at any given moment someone was struggling with the exact same problem you are right now?”

Up until now, I have also recommended that people use Tweetdeck or Tweetgrid in order to do those kinds of topic searches, but since I saw Nambu on Read/Write web the other day, I have been truly astonished at how good it is at compiling all of my searches into one space.

I can type them in one after another and then I can monitor them in isolation or in one stream. What this means is that even someone without a twitter account, can have a single stream of every topic that they could care about. While this isn’t a good sign for adding to the network, it is truly a great step forward for people who aren’t early adopters.

(Reading this back, I’m not sure that I am making a whole lot of sense. However, please go and check the program out (if you are on a Mac) and see for yourself if you think it would help more people to see the value in connected learning.)