Twibes? or similar?

[LeRoy Lee]

I have just recently stumbled across Twibes.com
It looks like it is just a way to pull together a group of twitter users (I refuse to call them tweeple, do'ah!). I have been thinking about a service like this for our Multnomah University so students can see the conversations going on on campus. Also, I could see this being beneficial for uwwebd.
My questions are...
- is there currently a twibe for uwebd?
- is anybody using this at their institution? Experience so far?
- is there something similar that you are using or prefer?

[Jessica]

I'm still on the fence about Twibes. I joined the higher ed one, but dont check it at all. I find that if I want to be in on that conversation, I can do the same thing by searching for #highered or RSS'ing those results. You could do the same thing for your school's mentions. Since I'm still not sure on how much our students are using it or talking about us (we've had very little mention of our school's name over the stream) I think a Twibe may be expecting too much.

I think if you see a lot of chatter going on about or with your university it maybe be a good idea to stream your tweets or just alert students to common hashtags and the like. I think this question depends on the level of use you already see with your audience and their Twitter savviness.

Professionally, I do not find this useful as I follow higher ed Twitters and can usually stay up on relevant conversations in Tweetdeck. If something becomes too large of a convo for Twitter, then it can be taken to a forum here. If anything the higher ed Twibe unearthed other higher ed Tweeters for me to follow, but beyond that I've not used it.

Helpful? I hope so. Just my relevant knowledge based on 10 months in higher ed at my University. :)

@jesskry

[Brent Passmore]

I set up one - http://www.twibes.com/group/ucabears

You can tell by the number of members how well it's taken off :)

[Seth Meranda]

I set one up a few weeks ago for higher ed in general (not specific to uwebd). You can join at: http://www.twibes.com/group/HigherEd.

I haven't found much use of it yet... as mentioned by Jessica a simple twitter search will yield basically the same results. I'm still messing around with it.