Why a Charlotte Twitter directory?

We're compiling a Twitter directory for Charlotte. On the first day 500 signed up, and more continue to do so. You can sign up here.

Here's why we are doing this:

The ability to search for topics and people changed Twitter dramatically, and made it far more useful and relevant. Evan Williams talked about it at the TED conference in February. Twitter went from a strictly "who" medium to a "what" medium.

Before that, Twitter was a kind of CB radio of the 21st century: "Here's my cute handle, listen to me try to be clever, let's mostly talk about how cool CB radio is." The tech blog Radar O'Reilly recently researched and wrote about Twitter's limited effectiveness as a wide-open conversation medium, and its importance in other, more focused areas.

The ability to search, categorize and focus Twitter is changing it from a noisy and frivolous medium to a medium of unforeseen utility and power.

Now Twitter is a lightning-quick headline service, a living wiki of expertise, the easiest and fastest publishing and broadcasting tool, and a long-distance message service with broad reach.

Search helped accomplish all of that. And keep in mind that Twitter search was not developed inside the company. Neither were @replies, or the best Twitter user interfaces. Users and third parties helped to develop all of these.

When I was in Silicon Valley last year, I was privy to some of the thinking of Twitter leadership. One way Williams and Biz Stone are looking at Twitter is like a broad satellite TV package with millions of channels. It's fun to surf, but it's also an unfocused time suck. They want user contributors to continue using search to help focus that experience.

So Steve Gunn, The Observer innovations editor, and I had an idea:

What if we could help to localize Twitter to Charlotte, and identify users' interests -- so you could use search to combine "who," "what" and "where"? What if you could say, "Here are the working moms in Dilworth that you know on Twitter"? Or, "here are the bloggers in Charlotte that you don't know on Twitter"? Or, "Here are the pizza places in Charlotte offering coupons on Twitter"?

We would like this to be like a phone book. If you want to be found on Twitter by other Charlotteans, and for your business to be found, opt in. If not, opt out. We will never use this list for spam, and will do everything in our power to make sure others don't either.

Some people join "follow trains" and even pay to get more Twitter followers. Others end up connected with shady people, fake accounts, strangers in far-flung places, porn sites, and Twitter robots. It's hard to know who the players are.

We'd like to add a new tool that helps build the Charlotte community on a volunteer basis.

If you want to be found by Charlotteans on Twitter, we'd love to have you. Building that community is our goal.

Again, here's the form.