21–30 of 62 posts
Would love your thoughts here or over email: arthur@slipstre.am
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.
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…
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 of everything. Isn't that better than random access?
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.
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.
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.
One of my friends tweets quite a bit about Magic: The Gathering. I don't care about that. Somehow I get along just fine by not paying much attention to the posts I don't care about. I don't quite understand your dilemma.
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've looked into this a bit, albeit more in a spam-filtering context; tweets have very little text for naive Bayes to latch onto. 140 characters would be 20-30 words, tops. That is so few words that it is hard to move the prior very much, unless there are blockbuster words that almost always indicate a bad tweet; as the article suggested, "breakfast", "beer", etc.
I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their interests down to only those that I deem relevant? Am I so bad at skimming content or choosing which content is worthy of in-depth inspection that I must have a computer do the editing for me?
Obviously, the answers to those questions are highly subjective and use-dependent. Personally, the only editing I need is the unfollow button. If I respect a person enough to want to hear what he has to say, I gladly take the risk that sometimes his output won't be immediately relevant. (As an aside, a year ago I met one of my favorite journalists. I asked how his dog was, since he had been tweeting about his new puppy. It was a nice ice breaker. I didn't follow him for dog-training updates.)
I should make a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy Twitter user. The ratio of feeds:twitters followed for me is something like 10:1.