Twitter's garbage problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#11

Post by jmillerinc » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:02 AM UTC

lftl wrote: 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.

In theory you could use multiple Twitter accounts for multiple channels. It would be sort of faking it, though.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#12

Post by jmillerinc » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:02 AM UTC

PanMan wrote: post #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 cl…

I've never heard of Jaiku, but what you describe sounds exactly like what Twitter needs.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#13

Post by jmillerinc » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:05 AM UTC

mgrouchy wrote: post #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…

Custom searches don't capture all of the good information that's out there because I may not specify the right keywords. It's ANTI-search that I'm personally looking for.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#14

Post by RyanMcGreal » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:06 AM UTC

lftl wrote: 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.

Just have two twitter accounts: lftl_business and lftl_personal.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#15

Post by julio_the_squid » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:07 AM UTC

PanMan wrote: post #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 cl…

That's about what I envisioned while reading the article. All you'd need is different sections on Twitter, and to choose which to subscribe to when following someone. All the clients would need to know is that you're subscribed to X's stream 0 but not their stream 1.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#16

Post by teaspoon » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:12 AM UTC

Anyone else find the "noise" posts less banal than the "signal"?

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#17

Post by pskettiwestern » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:13 AM UTC

This isn't Twitter's garbage problem. It's the garbage problem of the people this guy follows. Seems to me that building out a complicated system for channeling different tweets would hardly be worth the resultant complexity to Twitter and their users.

Is it so much to ask to employ a little restraint in publishing, and on the other hand, a little taste in following?

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#18

Post by jmillerinc » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:35 AM UTC

pskettiwestern wrote: post #17

This isn't Twitter's garbage problem. It's the garbage problem of the people this guy follows. Seems to me that building out a complicated system for channeling different tweets would hardly be worth the resultant complexity to Twitter and their users. Is it so much to ask to employ a little restraint in publishing, and on the other hand, a little taste in following?

I disagree. Some of the tweets I subjectively label as garbage might be legit. Hey, maybe some guy's mom is on twitter and wants to know what he had for lunch. It's not a people problem, it's a drawback of the platform that all of this different subject matter has to be broadcast in the same stream.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#19

Post by jrockway » Mon, May 17, 2010, 1:46 AM UTC

teaspoon wrote: post #16

Anyone else find the "noise" posts less banal than the "signal"?

My thoughts exactly. "quote from a blog post that everyone read three weeks ago" http://shrt.rl/omgaweomse #imanentrepeneuroneoneone!!

I read Twitter because I like to see what "meaningless" activities my friends are up to, not because I want a rehash of HN.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#20

Post by sketerpot » Mon, May 17, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

I can't believe nobody has mentioned naive Bayesian text classification yet. It sounds like it could work wonders for Twitter. I'm much more likely to be interested in tweets with words like "hylomorphism" than tweets with words like "omglol", and a text classification algorithm could learn that if you trained it up some. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to improve the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.