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It should be of no surprise that on twitter very close knit groups of people band together who have similar interests (e.g. friends, work colleagues, etc.), because twitter was designed to allow social groups to stay on top of what each other are doing. What intrigues me are the public cliques that form dynamically from people who have similar interests.

In my own effort to gain a twitter following, I have surfed twitter profiles by clicking on profiles of people I know and looking at who my friends are following on twitter. If those people look interesting (e.g. Interesting twitter posts or a good blog) I follow them and then click through to people that they follow and do the same thing. The act of doing this has led me to find several distinct groups of like-minded individuals who form what I call a twitter clique.

There are some obvious cliques like the Tech Podcasters (Laporte , Scoble, Veronica, et al), the Web 2.0 crowd (Rose, Calacanis, Arrington) and pro bloggers like Joy Wang, May Woo and Erica O’Grady. There are a lot of people who simply use Twitter for self promotion and there is a big clique of book authors who take every opportunity to pimp their next signing and tell us about how their current projects are going. However, the most interesting cliques are very unexpected like the 120+ people who follow the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (Roller Derby). I have found that Cliques can swarm around any subject and don’t seem to be limited to one social cast, for example I cannot image more diverse groups than work at home moms (Mommye), adult cam girls (Stacie Adams) and Obamamainians (Barack Obama).

It surprised me at first that most of the self organizing groups have formed around women or issues that are important to women, but then I realized that most men who are early adopters of technology are generally introverted geeks; therefore the early adopter women became the driving force behind clique swarms like raw food evangelists (emilyraw, 1rawgirl), Expat ESL teachers (Mleec), and wannabe actors who are always off on auditions. Eventually, I think that marketers will pay a lot of money to mine conversations of these cliques to better understand and market to specific demographics, but for right now I just am enjoying the conversation.

Your Turn

I am sure that the 500+ people that I am following just barely scratch the surface of the many cliques that intersect on twitter and other social media sites, what are some of the unique clique swarms that you have discovered?

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