Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?
Assumptions:
1. You follow around 100 people.
2. 50% of them tweet 5 times a day.
3. 20% of them tweet once.
4. 10% of them tweet once in a week.
5. 10% of them tweet 10 times a day.
This is a rough estimate for the people I follow.
If you calculate there is a total of 250 + 20 + 100 = 370 tweets per day.
Ignoring 50% of tweets as junk.
You have aproxly 200 tweets.
How I use twitter?
I like going to twitter.com and reading all the tweets.
But skimming 200 tweets is again a pain, so much of trouble. Besides few of the tweets might call for action. There would be some links that you would want to read later, there would be some friends who would be going out for coffee, and you might want to join them, etc. etc.
One idea would be to unfollow people, few of them might get offended and then your relations might ruin or something like that.
Another would be to create a fake profile and then follow only the ones you want to and are interested in.
Third would be to have some desktop plugin that would notify with the tweets, but that would be a distraction if you are working and are in the middle of something.
Fourth way is via lists, I do not like going to twitter.com/<my_user_name>/lists/xyz // the url does not look good.
So here is the question:
1. How do people on HN manage their timeline? (Like there are things like Zero Inbox http://inboxzero.com/ rule for managing email)
Is there something for tweets as well, or collectively can we brainstorm over here and come up with something?
2. What other functionalities do you wish tweeter had, like categorizing a tweet in your timeline, saving it for further action etc. etc.
35 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.0 ms ] thread2. I just think the DM feature could be improved. It's too hidden in the current UI on desktop and mobile.
What I've found over time is that, somewhat unsurprisingly, following people I know always results in more interest and engagement when I'm scanning.
due to these reactive tweets I have lost couple of followers over time ;)
having read your thoughts, do you think, there can be something like zero inbox for twitter??
I try to keep my following list < 50. It's usually a mix of real life friends, interesting people on Internet and services I rely on. A couple of those should not be there but my current client (Tweetbot) allows you to mute them.
I wish Twitter had an App.net-type system where you can continue reading from where you left off.
[1] http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/
Edit: That being said, I feel like a client that would let people sift through tweets more efficiently could be great for those who don't agree with me and end up following 10k+ people, and that approach definitely isn't uncommon.
Sometimes I think I may start using a list of "close relationships accounts" to make sure I don't miss anything personal, but I've yet to start doing this.
If I miss a load of tweets then I just have to accept that I missed it. It isn't the end of the world.
After all this, I switched back to plain Twitter and built my interest lists (smalltalk, music, friends, etc), but having to visit all these lists all the time became tedious too.
It's been around half a year I haven't read my Twitter timeline at all.
I know it sounds stupid for the way Twitter is meant to be, but until there is a functionality allowing you to silence people you follow, I just can't use it.
I know, why would you follow people if you were not interested in what they tweet? I guess I'm stupid.
Well, yeah. Who are these people that you want to silence but don't want to unfollow? What would unfollowing do, which you don't want, which silencing would not do?
But as a gesture of politeness, you might want to follow someone who has followed you and is close to you, but at the same time you would not want to listen to all his tweets, in that case, silence might work, and not unfollowing.
From the Smalltalk world, I'm pretty much interested in every single tweet. Besides, people in this group don't tweet that much.
As for musicians and bands, we usually follow each other in order to stay aware of gigs, recordings, etc. But following is also an act of befriending, so there are bands and individuals who tweet way too much but to whom I still want to show interest, so I can't unfollow them.
Friends and acquaintances from my town, however, you've got to follow them... and some of them are really annoying. I don't want to unfollow them because, as OP said, «few of them might get offended and then your relations might ruin or something like that». If you live in a small enough town, you'll know what I mean :)
That functionality has become indispensable to me, and I hate reading my timeline in other clients.
I don't visit Hacker News or Reddit every 2 hours to ensure I don't miss a single story. Similarly, I don't want to read every tweet, RSS item, or whatever. E-mail is the only thing I do that for and even then half of it is filtered.
I'm considering creating a Twitter list for people for who I wish to see every tweet (e.g. my dad who just joined) but it hasn't been important enough to do yet.
2. All that I want is provided by others apps (Pocket for "read later", Hootsuite & Falcon for conversation history)
Twitter website is really useless for power users, it's a shame they try to kill every others clients with their API restrictions.
If the tweet doesn't have a link, it is basically 140 characters of someone commenting on something and can be ignored. If it has a link, maybe it could be a tweet pointing to something interesting.
I make extensive use of lists, divided into about ten categories, each with over 150 members. I add people to lists without compunction, whereas users I follow are subject to much more stringent examination.
The alternative, which I've been thinking about doing, is just following everybody and treating the timeline as a river.
This seems like a ridiculous reason to me, but to each their own.
2. These days, after streamie stopped working, I have my own streaming twitter client. Easier to get exactly what you want when you are your own customer.
I find that getting a near-real time flow of messages is more engaging than twitter.com telling me I can now press a button to get tweets from 1-5 minutes ago, but maybe thats just me.
Some people are in a separate list. They basically tweet everything they can find or sometimes cry about stuff I'm not interested in for days. I just skim, over this list to see the interesting tweets.
Works for me, would likely fail horribly if I would follow more people.
I don't really need more features. Send 140 characters, read what others say, get a notification for mentions / DMs. The only thing I would find useful would be a synchronization between all clients. So my iPhone knows where I stopped reading on my iPad e.x.