Last week Interactive Marketing Agency Definition 6 launched TwitterINGO, an online game of sorts that leverages Twitter. I won’t go into all the details of how it works in this post, but essentially it’s a free downloadable desktop widget you run in the background while working (or at least trying to work… the game is a bit addictive to watch) as the game is played each Tuesday at 3PM EST. The tweets of all the people you follow stream down the left hand side while you get a 5x5 game board of keywords. When someone you follow posts a tweet containing a term you have on your board the square will highlight and fill in with that person’s tweet.

I am a bit biased of course in thinking the game is cool, I helped create TwitterINGO. The idea came from watching multiple columns of twitstreams in Tweetdeck and thinking how it almost felt like modern-day BINGO card. After a couple of brainstorming sessions we arrived at the current design. It has several premises.

1.       If you use Twitter to really, effectively follow the pulse of news and information that you care about you typically have to follow a fairly large number of people (typically at least in the hundreds and often in excess of that) and learn how to organize those people into groups in addition to creating effective searches for subjects.

2.       Finding the right people to follow who discuss the subjects of interest to you beyond your immediate circle of friends and colleagues takes some time and can be a bit of an art form as you sort through the clutter

3.       One of the real powers of social media is in how we help each other to find great people, pearls of wisdom, diamonds in the rough, etc.

4.       It can be really hard to identify the holes in your Following (you often don’t realize that you aren’t following certain subjects that interest you as well as you could be).

With this in mind we created TwitterINGO. With over 100 keywords “baked in” to the cards (all of them relating to popular and highly relevant subjects in the areas of interactive marketing, technology, media and advertising, application development, and social media), plus 20 current “terms of the week” on trending subjects sent out at the beginning of each weekly game, your card populates with a randomized selection of 24 of those terms, the middle square is free of course. Then you can simply sit back, have some fun and see what happens.

If you follow only a handful of people you will invariably become quickly disappointed as you realize none or few of your squares are populating. This can be a quick hint that you aren’t yet following the global conversations on tech and interactive or current events very well. On the other hand, if you follow a few hundred people who do talk about these subjects you’ll likely have a very different experience. I found myself fascinated watching my squares fill in (and unfortunately being less productive than I should be). It was amazing to see who I follow that randomly starting giving me the keywords I needed as I sought to get a row, column or diagonal completed to win. Every 5-10 minutes I’d get a square. First I got my “SharePoint” square filled by SharePoint Samurai @Gannotti. Then my “Brand” square filled by a post from @TobyDiva. Then Sun Microsystem’s Social Media guru @Sumaya posted a tweet with the term “open source”. I was off to a great start and saw another 4-5 squares fill in. And I came close to winning. But as I looked at what terms I needed to win (without cheating), I stared at the empty square with the word “Linux” in it. Why was nobody that I follow mentioning the word Linux? Hmmmm… there it was. A hole in how and who I Follow. I realized that I follow a lot of people on a lot of subjects but perhaps only a few that talk about Linux. To quickly rectify this I searched on the term Linux on Twitter and looked to see who the major contributors were and began following them. It was too late for me to win TwitterINGO this week, but it helped me do a better job of following that rather important part of the global technology conversation. The same can be said of many other terms I saw on my card that sat empty, I set out to see who was talking about the terms and found some really great people to start following.

While the game itself was rather fun, the real value was in seeing how it could help me. Plus I could then go look at the Leaderboard to see who the major Tweet Contributors were and who won and who they are following. The game is helping me to be a better user of social media to benefit my professional and personal interests and awareness. And I found a few extremely interesting people who played the game and won, people I’d never met before but that I certainly follow now. That's a game worth playing.