The Birth of a – possibly – groundbreaking social media tool

Some ideas are just a little bit more promising than others. Yesterday I strongly felt like being witness of the birth of a groundbreaking new social media tool. It’s called Tweep Like Me and it’s supposed to connect people with the same sort of twitter language.

Michiel Berger, a.k.a. @michielb, the inventor and developer of the tool, is moving fast. Yesterday he first came up with the idea, today he plans to have an active alpha-version. On his twitter-account he’s keeping all his followers updated on the process, in the meantime answering the many questions he gets from them and sharing first results.

My own enthousiasm grew after Berger’s system, still from a relatively small database, linked my account to tweeps that indeed are pretty similar to me. But hey, I know them, we already interact. Therefore I can’t wait to find out if this opens the way to tweeps that I don’t know of – and see if this leads to new, interesting connections. Ofcourse this all will be monolingual to start with, but if it works the challenge will be to make it multilingual.

Some of the thoughts @michielb shared with his followers during the last 24 hours:

Working on a nice project to find tweeps like me. Based on language similarity. Starting to work pretty good.

Most difficult steps first: integrating OAuth. With persistent cookies. Without OAuth no admission.

All the pieces of the puzzle seem to be there. Let’s do some online testing.

Hmm, first test result: a white screen. Get myself a glass of juice.

Yes! First screen shot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michielb/4337077283/

Maybe we’ll get a first alpha today.

Very curious where he is going to take us after that.