Filtering Twitter, Pt 2
(This was still an early draft until last night, so I’ll be massaging these sentences as the day goes on.)
General rule-based tweet filtering, and per-user @reply settings have one goal in common: give the user more control over the content they view when they launch a client or go to their Twitter homepage.
For whatever reason, there’s one answer so often given when someone cries about content overload or irrelevance: “Don’t like their posts? Unfollow them!”
No. I said I wanted to avoid the noise, not lose the signal entirely. Wrong answer, try again.
There are a lot of processing steps between a user pushing “Post” and that post landing in someone else’s stream. I want a place to cull the noise so the stream consists of good, clean signal. I want to increase the S/N ratio without dropping interesting people wholesale.
The underlying question and discussion is not new, but Twitter will likely be the first service where we make headway finding a solution. How do you navigate, and not be overwhelmed by, a new way of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people, each of whom are producing unique and interesting content, not all of which is necessarily always relevant to your interests?
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