Follow Twitter Groups with TweepML

TweepML is a new service just launched, aiming to make it easier for users to share a group of Twitter users they recommend. Anyone familiar with OPML for RSS should understand the concept and it can be really useful for certain services. TweepML is an open extensible format for grouping Twitter users but, along with the format, the TweepML.org service is launched to enable sharing the groups online.

“Imagine your small business has 3 people on Twitter and a corporate account. What happens if you want to tell people ‘Hey, you can follow Joe, Anne, Marc and BizToday’? They might decide to follow all those people, but it will be a bit of hassle of click-follow-back-back-click-follow-back-back. With TweepML you can tell people ‘Hey, follow all of us on Twitter’ and with a single-click your visitors can start following 1, 2, 10 or 50 Twitter users at once,” Marcelo Calbucci wrote on the newly launched TweepML blog.

The idea is simple enough and it's actually pretty sound. There are a number of organizations and businesses, which would benefit greatly from this kind of functionality. Twitter itself could have added the feature as part of a business pack but it's not in the habit of adding features that much these days. Anyone can implement their own functionality as it is an open standard, but most users would be better off using the service provided .

Creating a group is pretty straightforward and doesn't even require users to set up an account except if they want the group saved on the site to share it later or as a link. All you need to introduce is the list of twitter users either by name or by providing a link and a title for the new group. Following a group is just as easy. By clicking on a link for a group, users are taken to the list on TweepML.org and they can choose to follow the entire group or just selected users. One caveat at the moment is the fact that the service doesn't use Oauth for the Twitter login process but the site assures its users that it forgets any password as soon as they are done adding the group.