βackTwitter springs from the idea of using Twitter for 'backchannel' communication around an event. Jeff McClurken raised the possibility of using it in classes, for example. As an experiment in what that might look like, βackTwitter gives two separate channels for twittering.
To the left, is your twitter channel. This is meant to be just like other twitter applications, showing the tweets from you and your friends in chronological sequence, as well as providing a writing space from which to tweet.
The larger space to the right is for the group's tweets. It arranges the tweets first by person from left to right (spatially on the screen, not politically), then by chronological sequence.
A twitter account will have to exist for each event (e.g., an account for the course), and each person will have to use the Twitter.com interface to befriend that event. (Doing so from here might be added later). Then, tweet at that user as usual. For example, the demo event is 'btBeta', so begin your tweet with '@btBeta' and it will go to the group's tweets area.
To start, you'll need to enter your twitter username and password for the left window, and then the username and password for the event in the right window.. In real-life circumstances, the event info will be provided to you by an organizer. For testing and demonstration, use the default user 'btBeta' and its password, already filled in. (The devilishly clever among you will notice that, if you use your own username and password for both, you essentially get two different views on your twitterings.) An Update button for each of the views will, umm...yeah...update the list of tweets. The event's administrator (for the demo, that means me, patrickgmj), will then need to befriend you back before your tweets are included.
Security note: On one hand, this arrangement would let users tweet anonymously by logging in with the event username and password for both. On the other hand, it would give many people access to the Twitter account, making all manner of twitter-havoc available from that account. Then again, in the scale of things semi-anonymous twitter-havoc seems fairly benign. Nevertheless, I'm pondering possible approaches to removing this behavior.