Story Review

Do you use a Twitter client? Have you set it up to filter your messages? I do.

But is that completely ok? If you go through the Twitter how-tos that abound, one of the things you are absolutely sure to encounter is that on this social network one follows people who are interesting to them. So if you follow 200 people and they are all interesting to you, why would you need to filter some of them out?

Maybe it depends on the filters you apply. For instance, you could filter your Twitter stream for messages containing specific keywords that are of interest to you. Whereas those 200 people all have something interesting to say, they do not always only say interesting stuff. That’s alright then.

The reason I feel queasy about filtering my tweets is that I don’t actually pay as much attention to the keywords. There are several people whose tweets I don’t want to miss and they go into my “friends” group on Tweetdeck. Then there are about 20-30 other people who I find interesting and they go into another group. I also have columns with my @ replies and direct messages. And that is about all the Twitter messages I can handle.

The question is then why do I follow 200 people. Well, I genuinely believe that most of them are very interesting people. It’s just I can’t get to grips with the volume of their collective interestingness.

Unsure whether I was being right or just silly, I put a poll up on ask500people . Here’s what people had to say:

stevematthewson – Twitter in its pure form is a simple chronology, not always a useful way of navigating something. Filtering different friends, types of friends, argument threads etc is not much different to using categories on a blog, is it. If I chose to subscribe to different RSS themes off the same website, it doesn’t mean that the information is less important to me does it?

AlisonLDP – I don’t filter other than to put my ‘local’ followers together so I can track their questions to me more easily. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy the randomness of my Twitter stream; right now I’ve got everyone from an expectant dad who’s wife is in the labour ward to a discussion on suicide, to myriad links (including yours). I may not read them all but their all worth my attention to decide whether I want to peruse them further or not. Twitter is like wading through a river for me; it’s there to be jumped in and enjoyed. If people annoy me, or I find I’m just not interested in their tweets (and I’m not saying their boring, just not relevant to me) then I unfollow.

JonathanDeamer – It can be “wrong”, as in the case of people who follow thousands in order to get followed back, but then don’t actually pay any attention to all those that follow as they’re filtering via Tweetdeck etc.

But filtering can simply be a case of being actually being *more* interested in what those you follow are saying. I know I don’t want to miss out on tweets from any of my “real life” friends, so I filter them in Tweetdeck. Similarly, I have a filter to group all music industry people together, so I can refer to this when necessary (eg. work) or follow conversation on a topic as it develops, without getting distracted by people tweeting on other topics.

jodygodoy – Just started using twitter and until this question I had been wondering how people followed several hundreds! At this point if I really want to see what friends are saying I can click on their timeline, but it sounds like filtering will make it easier as I follow more people.