The Problem With Twitter is that the concept of ‘signal to noise ratio’ is an intensely personal thing. It varies greatly with mood, activity level of people being followed, current political events, weather, appetite, what’s on sale this weekend, presence of television ‘marathons’ of popular shows, etc, etc, etc. Even that one sentence has nearly depleted my desire to continue writing. I promise I won’t be talking about those things here. Suffice to say that the single linear stream of messages ordered by age is completely and utterly wrong.
I’ve seen people tagging twitter messages with things like #foo or #bar. I haven’t read the RFCs on this behavior (heh), but I’m guessing that these are really just tags, used to create relationships between twats (that’s right). I have NOT seen any notion of verbosity level, which is the one thing that twitter desperately needs. Just for you, here’s my million dollar idea. Please, take the challenge. I can’t do it cause I have handcuffs… but really, I wouldn’t even if I didn’t. I think the trickiest part of all this is that many of the people who would fix this are themselves the worst offenders, so performing my suggestion would constitute an admission that they themselves are often uninteresting. If that’s you, please understand that I mean no offense… I’m mostly uninteresting as well (the difference is that I don’t share it with the world). Just think of this as a way to refrain from driving users off your ‘platform’.
All twitter clients should support tagging outbound messages with a ‘priority’ of 0 through 9. Twitter users are not required to tag their twats (that’s right) with a verbosity level, but they are encouraged to do so.
All twitter clients should support a verbosity filter for the main messages view. I would implement this as a slider that effects the UI as you drag it up or down from 0 to 9. This would easily allow a reader to start at 9 and slowly drag down, seeing messages appear in order from most to least ‘important’ (still sorted by age).
Now, here’s the key. It is only natural that many or most of your followees (leaders?) will use what you consider to be an incorrect verbosity level for some or all of their messages. That’s why the client supports the notion of TwatFactor, a per-user setting which is a simple mathematical function applied to the verbosity level of all inbound messages from a given user. This could be as simple as “whatever that guy set, minus 3”, or something more debonaire like some kind of non-linear scaling factor that gets more or less ‘sensitive’ as you approach the extremes of the scale.
Extra credit: anonymously publish and consume TwatFactor settings from other users, the end result of which could be a bona-fide self balancing system where all users get just the amount of content they want.
Go!
