As the number of followers increase, so does the volume of tweets that one sees on his/her Twitter stream. Do all of the tweets matter? How do we know which are the ones that interest us without sifting through the deluge of tweets? I have tried to put together a set of criteria based on which tweets could be presented to the user. The tweets following this criteria may not necessarily be ordered chronologically . The critieria that I have chosen to distinguish tweets are:
- Who
- What
- When
- How
- Where
Most Relevant Criteria
The most relevant ones among the list above are the Who, What and When. As listed, there can be at least four categories of people with whom a person interacts with (Others can be expanded to office colleagues, relatives, experts etc). Tweets from people in these groups will have a precedence in that order. But it may not be a straight forward decision as the What comes into picture. Tweets could be text statuses or links. And of course spam, though one would not expect known folks to spam, but you never know. So, now it becomes a question of setting the rules: is a tweet with a link from a Close Friend of higher relevance than a text tweet from an acquaintance? These are the rules that one would have leave the user to decide. The client software should provide an option to customize these rules as per the user’s preferences. When a tweet was tweeted is also an important criteria as people are not interested in reading stale news. This should also be part of the rules interface.
What is not Relevant?
I am not looking to much at how or from where the tweet was created. If and when Twitter provides GPS capabilities tightly coupled with tweets, the Where part might get interesting.
Other Criteria
The things that are missing from the list are Hash Tags. Hash tags are a category of their own just like tags in a blog post. These should provide an alternative to the above list of criteria for selecting tweets to read. Also, in general, the criteria should be customizable, as what one user looks for may not be what another does.
As you may have noticed, this post does not cover replies and direct messages. When these are addressed to the user reading the tweets, he/she may put these at a a higher priority than the criteria listed. When replies are addressed to other users whom the current user is following, the tweet will fall under the text-real stuff criteria.
Conclusion
To conclude, we need smarter clients (web/desktop/mobile/other) that provide the ability to set/customize rules in order to make sense of the deluge of tweets that come one’s way. I hope the big ones such as Tweet Deck, Twitterific and maybe the interface for premium Twitter accounts (?) think about this and implement it in their future releases. Till then, keep sifting!
