TweepML revs up Twitter followings for groups of people, businesses

September 9, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

One of the best and strangest things about Twitter is that you can create your very own little echo chamber.

Enjoy wine? Well, follow a dozen sommeliers and restaurants. Want to be immersed in the Silicon Valley gossip? Follow a ton of entrepreneurs, engineers and bloggers. The problem is you usually have to track down interesting people to follow one by one. You pick up a user when you see an interesting tweet from them. Or you find people every Friday, when users participate in Follow Friday by tweeting about other users to follow.

TweepML aims to make the process easier by letting users share lists of other people to follow. The company has a few examples here of U.S. Senators on Twitter and speakers at the Twitter conference. In fact, in the name of shameless self-promotion, you can follow all the VentureBeat writers on Twitter too.

It’s an XML-based format, so you can build applications that share lists of Twitter users or build extra functionality on top of that. Creator Marcelo Calbucci recommends making a “tweepml.tml” file that contains a list of all the contributors to a Web site or all a business’ employees. With one click, a person can follow everyone in your group or company. Calbucci said a number of other start-ups are supporting the format including real-time search engine OneRiot, Gnip and Gist.

Calbucci, who was a manager and engineer at Microsoft, founded a personal homepage creator, Sampa, which closed down last month.