I was thinking about social networks in the context of local communitites earlier. It made me wonder if a type of “scope” could be added to a network like Twitter, where you could determine how localised you wanted it to be.

You could have a scope of the entire world, a country, city, or even a much smaller community. And I think it could be good if you could set a scope when composing a tweet, viewing tweets, or also globally per account.

For example, if you select a scope when composing a tweet, then that tweet will only appear in the timelines of people that fall into that scope. Anyone would be able to go to your profile and read it directly, but you could set who gets it in their timelines?

If you’re reading content, you might want a way to only view content for a specific scope. Not just get a list of trending topics from an area, but actually read a live stream of tweets limited to a particular scope.

I don’t know how many people would even use such a feature, I’m not even sure how much I’d use it. But I do think that one problem the world has with social media is that it makes everyone part of one worldwide discussion. Now that may be a good thing, but I don’t think all discussions need to be held at that scale.

Sure, humans are sociable creatures, but I don’t think we’ve managed the step between having small communities and then suddenly being connected at a global scale very well. And I’m not sure we ever will.