Twitter's garbage problem

I can't believe nobody has mentioned naive Bayesian text classification yet. It sounds like it could work wonders for Twitter. I'm much more likely to be interested in tweets with words like "hylomorphism" than tweets with words like "omglol", and a text classification algorithm could learn that if you trained it up some. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to improve the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.

I've always thought of this problem in reverse for both Twitter and Facebook. I have certain followers/friends that are interested in my thoughts about programming and business and others who would care more about where I'm going this afternoon. It would be nice if there were different publishing channels I could publish to different friends.

In all honesty, I always got the impression that the point of twitter was to tune into other people's noise, not to harvest useful information.

Sometimes I really miss Jaiku. There you could add multiple streams to your feed, but when following, could also decide to follow certain streams, or not. So I could follow someone's post, but not their flickr pics or delicious bookmarks. Comments on a post where separate from posts as well. Twitter makes this all one big mess. Let's hope annotations will be used to add this filtering (although I haven't seen post client, which is an annotation as well, used for this).

I've never met the author of the article, but I assume he's the type of person who is bothered when his Reader unread tally switches over to the plus mark.<p>I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their interests down to only those that I deem relevant? Am I so bad at skimming content or choosing which content is worthy of in-depth inspection that I must have a computer do the editing for me?<p>Obviously, the answers to those questions are highly subjective and use-dependent. Personally, the only editing I need is the unfollow button. If I respect a person enough to want to hear what he has to say, I gladly take the risk that sometimes his output won't be immediately relevant. (As an aside, a year ago I met one of my favorite journalists. I asked how his dog was, since he had been tweeting about his new puppy. It was a nice ice breaker. I didn't follow him for dog-training updates.)<p>I should make a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy Twitter user. The ratio of feeds:twitters followed for me is something like 10:1.

The author misses a trick (or I missed a mention of it). Filtering out by the <i>client used</i> by the third party helps a lot. You can immediately filter out tweets coming automatically or semi-automatically from systems like Gowalla, Foursquare, blip.fm, Sharefeed, last.fm, auto news posting services, or even just through the Twitter API. Anyone else who posts crap in a manual, deliberate way should just be unfollowed.

This isn't <i>Twitter's</i> garbage problem. It's the garbage problem of the people this guy follows. Seems to me that building out a complicated system for channeling different tweets would hardly be worth the resultant complexity to Twitter and their users.<p>Is it so much to ask to employ a little restraint in publishing, and on the other hand, a little taste in following?

I would post much more "garbage" if there was a decent filtering system. I only post substantive tweets as I'm worried I'll annoy people with useless stuff. Why would someone care about where I'm eating or what movie I'm watching if they don't even know me. So I keep it focused on purely technical topics.

I honestly don't see this as a problem. I don't read every Tweet that comes through my stream its kind of random access information, I look at twitter every now and then and if something interesting strikes me I look into it.<p>While filtering would be a good feature, I think saying its a killer feature is going a bit far. I don't think the reasoning that you could follow twice as many people would make much sense from a roi perspective. If your interested in roi, you wouldn't even worry about following people, you would create custom searches about topics you are interested in and deal with those. You would certainly get more info for your time spent on twitter that way and much more focused. You can do this with basic tools like Tweetdeck search columns or even or saved searches in the standard twitter web interface.

I have the same problem with Hacker News. I would love to be able to filter it based on my preferences.

Anyone else find the "noise" posts less banal than the "signal"?

BTW, twitstat mobile, <a href="http://m.twitstat.com/" rel="nofollow">http://m.twitstat.com/</a> has some of this filtering in place: don't show 4sq, etc, if you want.

I totally agree and was just contemplating the same topic. Spooky.<p>What gets me is even some of Twitter's own employees don't know how to use the service in a 100% useful manner. And you would be surprised who....Tweets like: "He said that?" or "Can't wait to see it" without references are GARBAGE. I also don't care that you are currently eating or thinking, in general, without learning SOMETHING in the process. They don't teach that at the company? In this age of videos, location-based tagging and pics, we have the power to do so much more than just talk.<p>Finally, I think this is an author controlled issue. We have the power to dictate what we write/ tweet and should respect our audience for listening/ following us. Unless we don't understand the tool, then it's a training problem.<p>I, @super74, try to direct message any personal or conversational tweets to only those who know what I'm talking about. My public messages tend to lean towards disseminating information, sharing creative ideas and offering my opinion on public topics.<p>Although I'm not perfect and may err from time to time, I have occasionally looked back and have been somewhat pleased with the bulk of my tweets.

Excellent post! I came to the same conclusions in February and am working on fixing the Twitter garbage problem (what I see more broadly as information overload) with Slipstream: <a href="http://slipstre.am/" rel="nofollow">http://slipstre.am/</a><p>Would love your thoughts here or over email: arthur@slipstre.am

&#62;A first approach is to simply filter out tweets by keyword. I think of this as anti-search: specify a keyword, and never see any updates containing that word.<p>&#62;Keyword filtering alone could probably solve 1/3 of the Twitter garbage problem<p>This sounds like an old problem, reiterated to me, with working solutions: [kill files](<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file</a>) in news reader programs, especially [score files](<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Score_file" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Score_file</a>).

If you are interested in particular subject matter, as opposed to genuinely interested in the people you follow, just run a search or advanced search. Both auto-update and provide filtering functionality.

I can't tell which of the examples are supposed to be the valuable ones...

Would be nice too if I only saw an RT once, not each time someone else on my list RT's it.<p>Heck, why not update the RT'd by info to include several people - to make it clear. But please, only show me the thing once!<p>Only a slightly different note, would be nice if twitter would store the "read" status - so that my different clients know what I've read and what I haven't. If it was core twitter functionality then different clients could all sync together nicely.