groups/channels

Great to keep people hooked up with similar interests or just to keep hooked up

See also this related thread:

When is Twitter going to get groups?

Imagine the possibilities. I work for a sales office, we could get rid of our in/out board and use a twitter group/channel instead. Hmm.... Come on, Twitter!

I think this is a great idea. Similar to the way other social networking pages and other sites (flickr, etc.) would allow people to join into groups where discussion pertains to their interests. There's already CNN and the like on Twitter. Thinking something like "Pets" where people who are ridiculously into discussing their pets could all unite and share their own conversations without having to individually locate and follow individual people. Maybe have "group sponsors" or "moderators" who could regulate their group (again, the way Flickr allows you to set up groups).

Damn, I also thought that groups and channels are needed on twitter to improve the signal to noise ratio. I'd like to get some of my fellow technology students on a channel to bounce around innovations that we are working on. This could be an ideal medium for this kind of random sharing on a single topic or for a group of related people. Just make sure the group search mechanism is better than what facebook has. When searching for groups there I usually get 500+ (which is a useless result). Searching by geographic location might be nice. Perhaps allowing the group members to add tags that are searchable as well.

Would it be possible to start up a group with a broadcast which anyone can read and then set it up so questions can be privately sent to the moderator of the group without everyone else seeing their responses? Or when you send a response out to the moderator, will everyone see it or can you control this?