Is there a way to manage your subscriptions to Twitter so you don’t become overwhelmed by the volume? And is there a role for genre metadata in separating the tweet from the chaff?

I’M ABOUT ONE MONTH INTO my experience of using Twitter, and I can see both advantages and disadvantages, when viewed as a tool for being pointed in the direction of interesting news, events and opinions. That of course is only one perspective to have on Twitter, the Internet service which asks you ‘What are you doing’ and lets you post a note to that effect in 140 characters.

That short-message limit misleads some people into a comparison with SMS text messaging, but the dynamics are very different. If you ‘follow’ another Twitterer, you will receive all of the ‘tweets’ they send. And unless you put up specific privacy blocks in place, anyone can become your ‘follower’. Likewise, you can follow as many other people as you like to. It’s common among friends who Twitter for the following to be mutual, symmetric — but there’s no necessity for the deal to be symmetrical (and there’s a difference with Facebook friendship).

The technology and the offer is essentially quite simple; the complexity comes from the people who engage with Twitter, and their different expectations and modes of action. A popular view of Twitter is that people use it to say things like ‘Waiting for the 188 bus’ or ‘An extra shot of expresso in my coffee this morning’. And some people do. Used like this, and in a symmetric link-up between friends, Twitter is a way of keeping the people you care about on your radar screen.

Another use of Twitter — and this is the one that attracted me more — is to follow people who can point you to interesting observations, news, articles and events: a form of knowledge-sharing. I am fortunate to have friends working around online social networking, media and community-building who devote a large proportion of their posts to such a function: typically their tweets include a shortened URL, clicking on which will take me to some very interesting information. If you are interested in following this sort of person, I heartily commend (by way of example) @Nico_Macdonald, @davebriggs, @DavidGurteen, @stephendale and @davidwilcox.

There are also some people who are such specialists in this use of Twitter that they have accumulated many followers, such as the journalist @glynmoody who specialises in writing about computer issues and ‘openness’ — Open Source, open content, open access to information etc. Glyn’s tweets are legion, but always well structured (and never about what he’s having for tea).

But can the Twitter experience scale up?

Where it gets problematic is when your receiving several hundred tweets a day — and you can reach that level pretty quickly, as I have found following only about 50 people so far (mind you, that includes two Guardian newspaper channels, @guardiantech and @guardianeco. And as I was realising this, my attention was drawn to a Twine posting by Nova Spivack, entitled Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?. It’s worth reading, as are the many comments it has been attracting.

Spivak points out that Twitter still has a fairly small user community, compared let’s say to Facebook, but millions are now starting to join the early adopters; and ‘many won’t have a clue how to use Twitter’, he moans. Also, robotic notifications will increasingly join the human content. The answer, he suggests, may be in adding some sort of metadata to tweets, on the basis of which users can filter the rush of Twitter messages.

Twitter does have a primitive kind of metadata labelling scheme: it’s called the hashtag. Thus, for example, I have suggested that all tweets about the upcoming British Computer Society’s Member Groups Convention should include the hashtag #bcsmgc. But as far as I can tell, hashtagging is only useful for content discovery, and not for filtering.

People are reacting in various ways. Some people retort, ‘Well, don’t follow people whose tweets are inane!’ (there is a new verb around now, to unfollow). This however is a rather drastic measure, and banishes someone from your screen for good.

One possible mechanism is to group the list of those you follow into Twitter groups; the Tweetdeck application which I use does that, and I have created a ‘NewsFeeds’ group and sorted the Guardian stuff and Glyn Moody into that. But the problem comes when you have Twitterers who broadcast tweets of several kinds of genre, some of which you are interested in, some of which annoy.

Let me illustrate the dilemma as it affects me thus: I value my Twitter link with my recently rediscovered friend Dave Snowden (@snowded). His tweets sometimes point to interesting stuff, and he’s been able to broadcast appeals for suggestions to those who follow him, to a few of which I’ve responded, hopefully helpfully. However, Dave also does tend to twitter excitedly and in great volume when there’s a rugby game on TV, especially if Wales is playing. Not having the slightest interest in games played by men with funny-shaped balls, I’d be happy to filter all those posts out!

I wonder, perhaps what we could do with is something not overly complex, but a simple two-dimensional faceted classification scheme for Twitter tweets. For subject classification, it may be that the hashtag system works well enough (though I have seen interesting cases of contention when Twitterers at a conference disagree over what tag to use for it!) Could we perhaps have a simple genre classification that would allow Twitterers to designate a tweet as ‘trivia’ or ‘broadcast query’ or ‘recommended URL’, and so on? One could encode the classification in a mere one or two hidden ASCII characters (so the data format wouldn’t need modifying), but add the genre-settings choice pop-up menu and the viewing filters to the various Twitter clients.

I can’t claim to have thought long and hard about the problem, but problem I have little doubt it will become. I’d be interested to hear the views and ideas of others.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)