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Twitter's garbage problem

jmillerinc.com

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Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#51

Post by Super74 »

I totally agree and was just contemplating the same topic. Spooky.

What gets me is even some of Twitter's own employees don't know how to use the service in a 100% useful manner. And you would be surprised who....Tweets like: "He said that?" or "Can't wait to see it" without references are GARBAGE. I also don't care that you are currently eating or thinking, in general, without learning SOMETHING in the process. They don't teach that at the company? In this age of videos, location-based tagging and pics, we have the power to do so much more than just talk.

Finally, I think this is an author controlled issue. We have the power to dictate what we write/ tweet and should respect our audience for listening/ following us. Unless we don't understand the tool, then it's a training problem.

I, @super74, try to direct message any personal or conversational tweets to only those who know what I'm talking about. My public messages tend to lean towards disseminating information, sharing creative ideas and offering my opinion on public topics.

Although I'm not perfect and may err from time to time, I have occasionally looked back and have been somewhat pleased with the bulk of my tweets.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#52

Post by bartl »

>A first approach is to simply filter out tweets by keyword. I think of this as anti-search: specify a keyword, and never see any updates containing that word.

>Keyword filtering alone could probably solve 1/3 of the Twitter garbage problem

This sounds like an old problem, reiterated to me, with working solutions: [kill files](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file) in news reader programs, especially [score files](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Score_file).

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#53

Post by retube »

sketerpot wrote: post #20

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.

I think stat/learning classifiers could work, even with the brevity of tweets. However, as the author says, one persons gold is anothers garbage. You'd need a platform/system that would allow for personal classifiers for each/every tweet consumer.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#55

Post by mgrouchy »

avk wrote: post #23
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…

"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." Don't you feel like you miss out interesting and relevant tweets with that kind of random access? Imagine if the proposed filters were in place. They would give you the best and most relevant…

No. Because I follow like 350+ people, I dont have time to read through every tweet. Also sometimes that tweet spam is relevant, you may notice someone is at some location close by via 4sq and meet up with that person, maybe I care if my close friends had eggs this morning for breakfast(maybe not, but you get the idea).

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#56

Post by mgrouchy »

jmillerinc wrote: post #11
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.

you could also use twitter lists.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#57

Post by mgrouchy »

jmillerinc wrote: post #13
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.

You are not going to catch all the good information that is out there with your follow list. So searching fills in the gaps(if your interested in a subject area or something). Twitter lists help too. (ie/ gather up all the people who are known to talk about x subject and put them in a list)

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#58

Post by bvi »

sliverstorm wrote: post #4

In all honesty, I always got the impression that the point of twitter was to tune into other people's noise, not to harvest useful information.

Sure, that's one way to look at it. But the more people you follow (seriously, who in their right mind would follow 50,000 people!), even noise gets noisier.

I think a quick and neat workaround would be to assign "importance" levels to folks you follow. For e.g. @billgates might be a '1' whereas @amanda9875 might be a '5' - so while you get every tweet @billgates sends out, you might only get every fifth message @amanda9875 tweets.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#59

Post by robgough »

Would be nice too if I only saw an RT once, not each time someone else on my list RT's it.

Heck, why not update the RT'd by info to include several people - to make it clear. But please, only show me the thing once!

Only a slightly different note, would be nice if twitter would store the "read" status - so that my different clients know what I've read and what I haven't. If it was core twitter functionality then different clients could all sync together nicely.

Re: Twitter's garbage problem

#60

Post by rogerclark »

jmillerinc wrote: post #36
rogerclark wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a people problem, but the problem is you. If you don't care about what he's having for lunch, then I'm not so sure what's so hard about ignoring his tweet. It's only going to be on your screen for a split second as you're scrolling through other stuff. Presumably anyone you follow would post more things that are worthwhile than not; otherwise, you should just find new people to follow. One of my friends tweets q…

I value my time and believe in improving things. What more can I say?

What I intended to convey was that your mind already possesses a filter for this type of thing that you could never hope to reproduce in software. I just don't understand what's preventing you from unconsciously applying it, since plenty of other people seem to be doing perfectly fine at doing that.
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