Observations on Twitter, Noise, Filters, Spam, and Value

April 8, 2009 by 7 Comments

This video contains a lot of thoughts on Twitter and the value of Twitter… lately things have seemed really noisy, with a lot of content that I may not want to see, some spam thrown in for good measure, and some otherwise tech-savvy folks who engage in what I feel are questionable Twitter practices. I talk about the value in one’s Twitter stream along with particular behaviors which degrade the value, wrapping things up with some solutions (both technical and behavioral) that I feel will increase the value of Twitter for individuals. The video is a bit long (a little over 13 minutes) but I’m hoping folks will watch and comment. Let’s increase the value of microblogging for everyone!

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  • http://tagal.us/ jnpdx

    I agree with a lot of what you’re saying.

    Something we haven’t really seen yet on Twitter is true spam abuse. For example, once more people realize that they can hijack a #hashtag and bombard people searching for the tag with unrelated information, the service will quickly become less useful.

    Filters are definitely the key. Your video got me motivated to update the filtering code in ComboTweet. You can read about the results at http://blog.combotweet.com/, but the gist is there are now limited filters for users and content. This only works for timeline stuff right now and not for search, but hopefully that will come soon. (Unfortunately there seems to be a bug causing occasional hangups in my browser which I haven’t nailed down yet, but I’m looking for it)

    If there were more open source clients out there, I think this would help the service evolve in this respect. Right now, with the majority of Twitter users relying on apps that are closed source with one or two developers, dreams like effective filtering are at the whim and discretion of a far-too-small group of people to make effective democratic changes to the service. If TweetDeck were open source or pluggable, we would already have access to this sort of thing.

    Of course, nothing against the devs of these apps for not opening up their source – they have no responsibility to – I just think it might end up being their downfall in the long run, in the same way that open source blogging software has become the most useful of the available tools

  • http://twitter.com/wikignome Tegan

    I’ve been talking about filters for a while. I just want to be sure they’re intelligent — examples: I don’t want to hear about the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, but I might want to hear about brewers in Milwaukee. I don’t want to know what you’re listening to on last.fm, but I might want to know about last.fm, the web service.

  • http://www.brewcaster.com brewcaster

    Noise was the reason I jumped ship from Twitter about a year ago. I guess now that I have been away from it, I look at twitter heads with confusion. What is there really to gain hearing about what time someone goes to bed? Or what they had for lunch?

    We are so quick to look for entertainment outside of our OWN lives that we are accepting to be entertained by the mundane minutia of OTHERS lives. I just don’t get it. Tune back into your REAL world. Put the PDA down and hug your wife, kids, dogs, whatever you have around you. YOU WILL NOT MISS ANYTHING.

    If it is that important, you will most likely see it one of the hundreds of blogs you read, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc…

    I think Twitter was a fun idea thought up by some smart folks, that had no idea it would scale to this size. I take the stance that this form of communication does not scale well.

    I think Facebook really takes the place of my desire to learn what my friends are doing. It’s not filled with, ” I just went to the bathroom” posts. You can add photos, videos, etc natively without the annoying shorturl.

    Again these are my views, and I apologize if I sound judgmental. I guess I take an Orwellien view on the way things are moving. I would rather spend time with people I care about talking in person, than shouting into a huge chasm of other shouts. I also don’t care and KNOW that nobody cares or SHOULD care about what I had for lunch, or how many unread messages I have after vacation.

    You know that person at work that talks out loud about EVERYTHING that is on their mind? Twit.

  • http://www.brewcaster.com brewcaster

    Also, you have some terrible audio video sync issues in that video. Let me know if I can help.

  • https://betsywhim.myvidoop.com Betsy Richter

    I think you still overestimate our capacity to adhere to email etiquette. The first three or four recent email messages from my mom, for example, have squarely been in the ‘forward this to ten people in order to get good luck’ camp. When she wasn’t playing with emoticons, adding in colored fonts and/or backgrounds, or typing her entire message in the subject line, that is…

    You could write it off to ‘newbie enthusiasm’ — except that she caught the email forwards from people who have been online for years and years and years. That and the fact that how many people *still* respond to spam messages, anyway?

  • jshardison

    These are micro-blogging issues that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and, for my money, I think you have a solution with filters. In other words, I’d pay for filters before I’d pay to use Twitter. It would allow me to follow a person to receive certain types of information I care about (say, an upcoming concert), while avoiding that which I care less about (e.g., how sick the person I follow is the morning after said concert). I tend to agree with Betsy that you may overestimate people’s capacity to adhere to electronic communication etiquette. Personally, I’d prefer to rely on a technological solution such as filters rather than hope humanity will change its ways overnight.

  • http://www.adronbhall.com Adron

    I’m currently working on an application that will provide a filtering mechanism. We’re hoping to really get it moving forward over the next couple of months. When it is released, one of the things that it will have is the ability to filter. The basic idea is to allow more of what you want to ignore from people but enable more of what you want to hear from your twitter peepz. I’ll be sure you’re one of the first to get informed when it is released.