Proposed New Services - TwitterBack And TwitterGraph

Like many friends, I now prefer using twitter to share comments about blog posts, instead of writing a comment directly on the blog itself. The reason I prefer twitter is simply because I can have an immediate conversation about my discoveries (TinyURL) and thoughts with my social network. Yet part of me would still love to let the original blog author know what I think about their post, via a twitter trackback mechanism but is that possible?

Sadly, following an extensive search, I only found several wordpress to twitter and twitter to blog tools that enable me blog and automatically update/display my status. I also found twitter to Facebook and Skype but I didn’t find a twitter (comment) trackback solution.

So I re-read how trackbacks work and I also re-read the Twitter API documentation.

The HTTP-post similarities and support for hAtom between blogs and twitter made me think it must be possible. All that is missing is a twitter XML-RPC post mechanism to ping the originating blog using a trackback (Tiny) URL. i.e I could write my twitter post and then before I send it out, I would manually cut and paste the trackback URL into twitter. The twitter XML-RPC ping notification service would then alert the originating blog post.

I would love to see this functionality added by Twitter (otherwise a Greasemonkey or Operator Script would do fine ) because I think it would increase the conversational index for many blog sites which has drifted away to twitter and the like. This proposed twitterback solution got me thinking what else would I like to see in twitter.

The recent discussions about the social graph and the launch of twitterposter made me wonder if I could change my friends list to become my personal twitterposter i.e twittergraph which would show certain friends images larger either to reflect their influence i.e number of followers or better still the number of times I have communicated them directly either via an @ or d call.