

Photo by Jeremy Cai from Unsplash.com.

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

I previously wrote about using Dunbar’s number to decide how many people you should follow on Twitter. A year later, I still feel Twitter quickly becomes increasingly less useful as you try to closely follow many more than 150–200 users.

In hopes of keeping myself on a low information diet, I had long avoided using Twitter lists by trying to carefully curate who I followed in my main timeline.

Over time, the task of limiting the number of users I followed became impossible while working on projects such as The Rheumatology Podcast and #RheumJC, and connecting with related groups such as #NephJC.



Recently, I discovered a service called Nuzzel, which curates the most frequently shared stories from your timeline. In their words:

“We created Nuzzel to solve the problems of social overload. You can use Nuzzel to discover the best news stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter without being overwhelmed or missing anything.”

Because of Nuzzel, I have actually found it useful to follow more people in my areas of interest (healthcare/rheumatology, technology, fitness), and let the service automatically curate the most frequently tweeted stories.

After following more users on Twitter, I finally started using Twitter lists. Since the methods built into Twitter (and my beloved Tweetbot) are not extremely useful for reorganizing significant numbers of users into Twitter lists, I found twitlistmanager.com extremely helpful for managing this task.

The advantage of using Twitter lists because of Nuzzel is that it easily allows me to keep the number of people in any of my lists well under 100 (maintaining my monkeyshere), while still allowing me to find the shared stories of highest importance.