Thursday, March 26, 2009

ExecTweets and the Richard Branson Twitter 'Scrape'

I just discovered ExecTweets, launched March 23 by Federated Media Publishing in partnership with Microsoft and with an assist from Twitter and its open-source platform.
ExecTweets is sort of a Twitter-aggregator, almost a Twitter-bypass for people who want to sort through the Twitter clutter and focus on the tweets of top executives in retail, technology, media/advertising and assorted industries.
Federated Media described the initiative here, pointing out that ExecTweets is a way to follow C-Suite executives without sorting through all of the low-lifes (my words and I'm kidding) that you already follow on Twitter.
Which brings me to Richard Branson, who is a featured ExecTweets tweeter. Of course, all of this ExecTweets tweeting appears to be going on without the express permission of the assembled tweeters, but there is an email address at the bottom of the home page for CEO tweeters who want to opt out.
I made reference to the "Richard Branson Twitter Scrape" in this post's headline because it reminded me of how metasearch engines, back in the day, used to scrape airline sites for fares. Of course, there doesn't appear to be any "scraping" in the classic sense going on here, just some neat aggregation through an an appealing API.
Branson's ExecTweets and Twitter posts aren't very earth-shattering at the moment. He's soliciting Ask Richard Anything questions, and informing us that thongs were given out "on our our first V Australia flight from Sydney to LA!"
Hey, in what other blog besides the Dennis Schaal Blog can you read about OTA booking fees, cool new applications and thongs?
Anyway, ExecTweets has a lot of potential. You can follow Steve Case and other bigwigs, although I don't see many travel industry folks yet, other than Branson and Billy Sanez, an American Airlines communications executive.
Speaking of which, shouldn't there be room on ExecTweets for an online travel journalist and blogger with the initials D.S. and the Twitter moniker @denschaal?
There I go again with my shameless self-promotion:)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I always support people with the initials D.S.

Dennis Schaal said...

Scott: I accept the endorsement, although my committee is still working out the kinks in my platform:) Ha.