LexTweet : Labor of love and a work in progress

LexBlog launched LexTweet.com, a community of legal professionals using Twitter, 22 days ago. The community has already grown to over 1,500 members.

Though we’re playing around with ideas, LexBlog has not determined how we’ll monetize LexTweet. Unlike many Web 2.0 companies, LexBlog cannot do a lot of work that it does not realize revenue on. We’ve got 17 people working on the team who need to be paid, we want to be around for years to come, and my wife, Jill, likes me more when I bring home a paycheck.

LexTweet has been a real joy though. I hope those of you using LexTweet to discover what legal professionals are saying and to find people to follow are having as much fun as I am.

We’re bring a real community of lawyers together, a tribe if you will. As marketing professional and author Seth Godin, says, ‘All you need for a tribe is people with a common interest and a means of communicating.’

Since working with legal communities on AOL 13 years ago, I’ve loved bring people with similar interests together. In the case of lawyers, I think we’re some pretty good folks who offer the American people a great deal. And over the years I’ve found lawyers to be some of the finest people you’d ever want to meet, both personally and professionally.

LexTweet not only allows us to get to know those we already know a little better, but allows us to discover those we don’t already know. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements, says ‘Facebook is for the people you already know. Twitter is for discovering the people you want to know.’

3 weeks into LexTweet, I know it’s a project LexBlog will continue to work on. In the coming weeks and months expect to see:

• Groups of users by area of law, specific professions within the law, geography, and memberships to organizations.
• Profiles of users making it easy to get to know who to follow.
• Display of brief profiles when mousing over a person’s avatar.
• Event grouping of LexTweet users ala LegalTech in New York next week.

As with any good community, we’ll listen to you, the members. Continue to share ideas how to improve LexTweet.

LexBlog will work with you to make LexTweet a community that we’ll all find personally and professionally rewarding.