My friend Criag Cmehil put together a neat little service that fakes a group function in Twitter. Here’s the URL for the website.

The way it works is like this:

1) Follow “eventtracker” in Twitter

2) Send a Tweet to “@eventtracker start*oow” (in this case the group is “oow” for Oracle OpenWorld but you can create any group on the fly by entering a code)

3) Everything you tweet will now get picked up by the eventtracker and you will have an ad-hoc virtual group.

4) To stop the service sent “@eventtracker stop*oow” (or whatever your code is).

The important thing to remember about the first rev (and keep in mind that Craig coded this in just the last couple of days) is that from when you start the eventtracker to when you stop it everything is trapped by the service. There is no filtering in this first rev, but Craig tells me he is working on it.

Even if you are not attending the event in question this is a great way to interact with people who are there.

BTW, if you want to follow the action at OpenWorld this week, just bookmark this link for the full OOW twitter feed going through eventtracker, and judging by the activity already there it looks like this will be a fast building feed.

Props to Dennis for instigating this little project, it was his connecting of the dots that inspired Craig to apply his considerable intellect to the problem.