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Twitter's garbage problem

jmillerinc.com

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Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#2
I honestly don't see this as a problem. I don't read every Tweet that comes through my stream its kind of random access information, I look at twitter every now and then and if something interesting strikes me I look into it.

While filtering would be a good feature, I think saying its a killer feature is going a bit far. I don't think the reasoning that you could follow twice as many people would make much sense from a roi perspective. If your interested in roi, you wouldn't even worry about following people, you would create custom searches about topics you are interested in and deal with those. You would certainly get more info for your time spent on twitter that way and much more focused. You can do this with basic tools like Tweetdeck search columns or even or saved searches in the standard twitter web interface.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#3
If you are interested in particular subject matter, as opposed to genuinely interested in the people you follow, just run a search or advanced search. Both auto-update and provide filtering functionality.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#6
I've always thought of this problem in reverse for both Twitter and Facebook. I have certain followers/friends that are interested in my thoughts about programming and business and others who would care more about where I'm going this afternoon. It would be nice if there were different publishing channels I could publish to different friends.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#7
Sometimes I really miss Jaiku. There you could add multiple streams to your feed, but when following, could also decide to follow certain streams, or not. So I could follow someone's post, but not their flickr pics or delicious bookmarks. Comments on a post where separate from posts as well. Twitter makes this all one big mess. Let's hope annotations will be used to add this filtering (although I haven't seen post client, which is an annotation as well, used for this).

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#10
post #6

I've always thought of this problem in reverse for both Twitter and Facebook. I have certain followers/friends that are interested in my thoughts about programming and business and others who would care more about where I'm going this afternoon. It would be nice if there were different publishing channels I could publish to different friends.

You can do that on Facebook: when posting a status update, the drop-down box under the lock icon has a "Customize" option, which will pop up a dialog where you can select specific people or pre-created lists of friends for it to be visible to (the lists function essentially as channels, like "colleagues" or "family"). You can also set one of those channels as the default. I know a few people who do that fairly regularly to separate friends vs. colleagues vs. family updates. But it's a bit of a hassle and sort of buried.

For Twitter, I know a few people who have two Twitter accounts, a "work" and a "personal" one. Also somewhat of a hassle, though maybe actually less of one.

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