I don't really care about stuff that's outside of my friend group. My friends are already pretty good at bringing me good stuff from outside the group anyway. - Robert Scoble

will miss you. - Zee.

Zee: huh? - Robert Scoble

re "be right back" - Ken Sheppardson

wrong thread Zee? - Amit Nangare

This would get rid of all spam and bad actors. Or almost all, assuming you don't follow spammers. - Robert Scoble

Robert's initial first comment was "be right back", as a placeholder to keep the first slot while he composed his real first comment. Zee was responding to that - Ken Sheppardson

And it would bring back Techmeme-quality results because it would be based on people you follow and verify. Oh, and even better? The new list feature in Twitter will let you build different kinds of searches. - Robert Scoble

Ken: oh, I get it now. :-) - Robert Scoble

By the way, FriendFeed still has a better way to have conversations with your friends than Google Wave. :-) - Robert Scoble

cant wait to try google wave to tell how much it sucks - Muneeb Hussain

By the way, everyone complains about Twitter's spam but I get 100x more spam and more destructive spam on my blog's comments. - Robert Scoble

i cant comment till i actually try it .... comon google - Kashif Khan

I wish I had more invites to hand out. - Robert Scoble

I suspect most people are following few enough people on Twitter that they're capable of tracking "trends" themselves. - Ken Sheppardson

Scoble thank you for coming back - ffcode

Ken: absolutely not true. I'm watching nearly 5,000 people now and most of those are following thousands. - Robert Scoble

Robert: You're not "most people" - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: but the people I'm following ARE most people and most of them are following too many to keep track of trends themselves. - Robert Scoble

Most of the 5,000 people you're following are following thousands? I'd love to see the actual numbers behind that... you've done some analysis? - Ken Sheppardson

want a screenshot of your feed how it looks like? - ffcode

agreed - that type of search filtering would not only be useful, but the whole point of social network information sharing - using my friends as my distributed search engine for things I am interested in - Arthur Coleman

ffcode you want me to send you a screenshot? - Robert Scoble

Ken: informal analysis. I hand followed each of the people I'm following and looked at their following behavior. It is rare to find someone who is following fewer than 200 people now. At least amongst early adopter tech influencers that I like to follow. - Robert Scoble

Hm... There's an API call to retrieve a list of users a given user is following... would be simple to do a full-blown check.... - Ken Sheppardson

to build a list is also difficult as i have learned from the little experience i have had - ffcode

Ken: you're welcome to do that. - Robert Scoble

StatusSearch did a non-realtime version of this, but they appear to have scratched it at the moment. - Steve Farnworth

With viewpointapp.com; we are doing real time relevance and filtering within the people you follow. Search and trends sounds like a great idea. We will see what we can come up with! - Jay from Cadmus

It would be interesting to see if the trends differ than the trends posted on the Twitter home page. I'm sure it would correlate to the size of your sample. - Mattb4rd

I might, Robert. Also, I hope the voice you hear in your head when you read my comments here isn't snide and snarky. I'm genuinely curious about this from a tech standpoint. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

I've wanted something like this for a long time. I guess I just assumed that it was obvious enough that someone (maybe even Twitter) would already be working on it. Maybe we'll take it up as a side project. - Ryan Kuder

I think this would be very useful. Twitter Times is going in this direction but right now it doesn't have search or trending topics. Their main focus now seems to be aggregating links/stories (techmeme-style) that are popular among the people that you're following. Here's my personalized Twitter Times page: http://www.twittertim.es/mdoeff - Mike Doeff

re trends for just the people you are following, it's right here: http://friendingtopics.com/ - Mike Lizun

What is being overlooked here and to which I believe I heard mention that Twitter was building in-house was the ability to trend against any topic/individual in the network. Perfect for gaining market feedback on competition outside of your network. - Gregory Hanson

Granted, it's a little off topic as the main point of the thread was for people you follow, but building an open trending app would broaden market appeal. - Gregory Hanson

That would be a good tool. But wouldn't it be cool if you got a pair of tech guys, built it out and returned to raise VC money yourself? :) Stop giving away your free ideas! - Louis Gray

Louis: I tried building new app at NPR last Friday and I decided I suck at it. :-) - Robert Scoble

Louis, hush! I want more free ideas. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

I've been enjoying the "search my timeline" feature in the Tweetie 2 iPhone app -- looking forward to the desktop client getting that feature as well. Totally agree with Robert, though: It seems like search/trends among the people i'm following has an incredible about of value to a user. A user like me. - Ryan Sholin

Mike Lizun: Works ok though it'd be better if you made trending topics at least 2 words (trending topics always seem to be 2-3 words). I get a lot of one-words that don't give me much. The trend should follow a longer duration of time as well. I am following 2000+ and only see a few tweets for certain trending terms. - beersage

yeah, i built out the search concept but saw Twitter announce they're doing it. decided to stick to other concepts and chase the $ elsewhere. thanks for the validation of a good idea though - Gregory Hanson

Wouldn't something similar be interesting on FB or any social network for that matter? Is Twitter more interesting due to the volume of tweets? - Dave Hodson

Twitter needs to incorporate this in the API, IMHO. - Dennis Jernberg

Sounds to me like something Facebook would do if they implemented trends. - James Harnedy

Good idea about the "Trending" element, Robert. As far as search, really FriendFeed got pretty close if only their import of Twitter friends could have been more complete (not just those already on FF). Stands to reason that the FF guys could have added a trending functionality, Alas... BTW, I just noticed that at ~ 2,500 subscriptions on FF, the "Add To List" pop-up craps out. No more seeing who you already subscribed to a given list. Programming error, it should first only load the subscribed-to peeps, then bring up new candidates by search criteria only. Of course now we'll unlikely ever see this fixed... - Alex Schleber

BTW, been saying that Twitter needed search on one's friends/following stream for months: http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comm... - Alex Schleber

Yeah you r right, there exists no twitter trends just for your tweet stream/tweet inbox (tweets you receive from other people). - TrafficBug

Actually we have. http://journotwit.com - take a look at the Tag clouds. Also running http://uktjpr.com for the UK technology journalists and PR community so you can see what's happening right now in UK technology. - Dan Monsieurle

I'm working on useful technology that takes a slightly different approach to searching just your Friends on Twitter (and Facebook is coming soon) with http://refynr.com ... my approach is to allow users to create a List of up to 20 keywords, and then Refynr returns a real-time Stream of tweets only from the tweeps you follow. Also, Refynr auto-saves all relevant tweets that match your criteria so that you have a history of relevant tweets to look at later, or to play "catch-up" while you were on vacation... I need more Alpha Testers please. - Aaron Longnion