Some Thoughts On Twitter

Twitter is most likely one of my favorite web applications. The thing that I believe has made Twitter so popular and the thing that will keep it growing is it’s ease of use. It’s one of the first web applications that the majority of it’s requests come not from the actual website.

I’ve been thinking for a while now, “Ok, twitter is great but where to next?” What could they possibly do that would make me want to use it more? Could I use it more is probably a valid question as well. :)

Information Overload

One of the things that is rampant online now, especially in my life, is information overload. I spend most of my days online and I process a butt load of information. Over the past month, I’ve been working to streamline how I receive and partake in this information using services such as del.icio.us (ma.gnolia before that), instapaper and google reader and ideas such as zero inbox, gtd and a few I’ve come up with on my own. This has helped, but since I’ve began to branch out on twitter, I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of time for me to keep up with all the people I follow.

Now, you might say, “Information overload is self-induced” and you would be correct but even still, I’d like to find a better way to process the information rather than cut it out all together. The main reason for this is that though I often am strapped for time and have to really be choosy about what I soak in that day, there are also, occasionally, days that I can’t find something to read if I try. Not sure what brings about those days but it happens.

A Little History

The first place that information overload hit me was Google Reader. My feeds got out of control not too long ago so I started unsubscribing. That helped for a while but I’m creeping back up again. I started to think about how I read my feeds and realized that though it is not documented and exists only in my head, each feed has a rating. Not necessarily a 1-10 rating, but more of a no matter what, when i have time, and when i am bored scale. There are some feeds, like those in the label friends, that I read no matter how busy I am. Likewise, there are others, that even when I have time, I tend to avoid them for whatever reason, but I’m not yet ready to unsubscribe. My coping mechanism in GReader is to label things in particular ways and that helps me process that information more efficiently.

A Few Suggestions

So I say all of that to help twitter how? Well, I’ve noticed that lately I wish I could cluster twitter in the same way I often do other web applications by tags or labels, so that I can better throttle and sort through information on a busy day, and yet still enjoy all those fabulous tweets on a more relaxed day. First off, I was thinking it would be cool to categorize those I follow by entity type. Show me only the tweets from real people. Show me only the tweets from companies. Show me only the tweets from magazines or rss to twitter bots. Those types of classifications would be handy. Twitter is by far the quickest way to get news about anything. Often links, news and such appear on my iphone 30 minutes before they hit Google Reader and other types of media I consume.

Also, just in the twitterers I follow that are people, there are different circles. I have my friends circle, which I follow most closely and even send to my phone. I have my rails circle which I follow for updates on what people in the community are working on or what they think are cool. I have my web dev circle, which is noticeably smaller than I would like it to be, as I don’t want to over commit myself to twitter. Heck, I even am starting to follow those in a higher ed circle. I’d really like to be able to see these groups separately. One reason is, as in google reader’s case, to be able to assign importance (even if it is mentally) to certain followings. Another reason, a bit more important, is that often these groups have conversations amongst themselves and it would just be easier to follow if I could see them separated.

So that is it. My suggestion to twitter is, recognize that you are becoming people’s chat and feed reader and inbox all in one and start working on helping them organically organize that inbox. The end. Oh, and plz give me ridiculous stats about myself based on my twitters along the lines of google reader trends and web history. kthxbai.