Overload & innovation in Twitter clients

I was at the Glue conference recently and one complaint I heard frequently about Twitter was that people were being overwhelmed with the amount of data coming in - to the point that Twitter had become useless to them after they’d followed greater than x people.

At first, this confused me. I’ve never considered tweets “must-read”. If I did, I’d never get anything done. Instead, I just sort of slurp from the fire hose periodically. If I see something cool, great. If I miss it, oh well. As a data consumer, I use Twitter basically the same way I use radio.

So it surprised me that other people were consuming Twitter more similarly to email - that is, as a set of messages that all required attention. With that usage scenario, it made a lot more sense to complain about the volume of incoming data.

And they’re not alone. I’ve seen a fair number of tweets about what other people should or should not tweet - certain tweets are considered annoying. Case in point - I personally dislike seeing twenty posts a day from someone live tweeting some event.

But asking people to apply a filter on the data producer side seems entirely backwards. Sure, I don’t like conference tweets, but I’m sure somebody out there must like them.

What we really need is a lot more innovation on the data consumer side - i.e. in the Twitter clients. Now, I won’t claim to be an expert on Twitter clients (I’ve only tried TweetDeck, Nambu, and Tweetie so far), but from what I’ve seen, they’ve mainly just wrapped the default Twitter feature set in (very nice-looking) non-web UIs. Admittedly, there are some cool features - cross-service support (e.g. Facebook), grouping contacts, and threaded conversations. But to really solve the Twitter overload problem, we need clients that make the next leap forward.

Here’s a few features that would dramatically help data consumers (if any clients have these features, please let me know in the comments).

Groups

I know some clients already support this, but this concept can be pushed further. Basically, I want configurable categories so I can break people I follow into groups. One one end are those people whose updates I want to treat as “must-read”. On the other end are people I felt obligated to follow but don’t really care about. And there are a few groups in between.

Popular Links

I may not read every tweet, but if the same blog post gets mentioned by a significant portion of the people I follow, chances are I’ll be interested in it. A client could follow links through the URL shorteners a few times a day and compile a daily list, sorted by popularity.

Micro-trends

Along the same lines, it’d be cool to have a personalized version of Twitter trends. I’m likely much more interested in the trends specific to my network than those of the Twittersphere as a whole.

Topics

I’m often interested in tweets using a particular keyword. I should be able to either pull all those tweets into my main stream or, alternately, pull those tweets into a separate stream for viewing - and have them update automatically.

Ignoring

Sometimes I feel spammed by live tweeting or by a particularly talky user. I’d love a way to filter out all tweets by a particular user or featuring a particular hash tag for a few hours or a few days.

Bayesian Filtering

If it works for spam, why can’t it help me filter my Twitterstream? I’d be happy to train the system by identifying tweets I like and don’t like if it helped me pull really great stuff out of the river of incoming tweets.

In a nutshell, I want to play ninja with my incoming data - slice it, dice it, organize it, prioritize it, filter it, and mash it up*.

And I don’t think Twitter should provide any of this. Their job is just to help you publish your tweets to the world. Instead, we need a competitive ecosystem of Twitter clients to create innovative (and customizable) interfaces to help each of us drink from this fire hose of information in our own unique ways.

What features would you like to see the in next generation of Twitter clients?

* I do, however, think it makes sense for producers to create different channels of information for widely different contexts. You see this already when people create multiple Twitter accounts - for example, one for personal stuff, one for professional stuff. When I tried to push my Twitter updates to Facebook, it was a disaster. The content of my Twitter updates were mostly technical or professional - to my old high school friends, that content seemed either unbearably boring or annoyingly self-promoting. I had to recognize that they were fundamentally different channels, and I don’t think any client is going to help my followers separate those contexts effectively (at least not without a lot of effort on their part).