I love Twitter, but I’m pretty careful about who I follow. The sheer amount of stuff being pumped out to me through Twitter is extremely noisy and overwhelming. I’m sure plenty of people are nice enough as friends in real life, but I’ve learned that the most benign person can go on an unexpected, unprovoked tweeting rampage. And I ain’t got the time to read that crap. I don’t even have the time to ignore it whenever I see it!
I guess I could acquire a fancy Twitter client for filtering purposes, but I already use multiple computers and a cell phone to access Twitter. Syncing my filters on multiple devices for Twitter sounds like an exponential time suck. So, instead I propose that Twitter make some changes:
1) For the love of God, all that is holy, and all that is unholy… PLEASE LET ME TURN OFF DIRECT MESSAGES!
Oh sorry, was that annoying? Well it’s not as annoying as how much I get DM bombed on our @blogthings account. I know I could just unfollow these people, but the volume is too heavy to even manage it that way.
I also could be one of those businesses that just doesn’t follow anyone, but then people think you’re a dick.
I love direct messages on my personal account, and I simply do not follow anyone who I wouldn’t want to get messages from. I would follow more people if I could block direct messages from them. I just don’t want to give strangers that kind of access to me right away.
2) I would like to be able to delete individual tweets.
Sometimes the things people say annoy me. No big deal… I’m sure that I’m equally annoying.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could just delete a certain tweet from my view and move on? Since I can’t, I usually end up unfollowing people out of sheer irritation just because they’re tweeting a little too much about what happened on American Idol.
3) Let me filter out certain keywords.
Like deleting individual tweets, but much better, because I don’t want to hear anyone talk about Iran ever again. Seriously. You fuckers on Twitter burned me out on that shit. I don’t care if Ahmadinejad is currently sitting on your lap in a tutu. Just zip it.
4) I would like to be able to hide people’s updates when I feel like it, Facebook style.
My interest in certain people (especially those I haven’t actually spent time with offline) waxes and wanes. It’s just a fact of life.
When it comes to unfollowing a blog, I can just unsubscribe. No big deal, no one notices.
If I unfollow someone on Twitter, it occasionally becomes this huge drama. People sometimes say things like “It hurts to be unfollowed.” People feel snubbed, and that’s awkward, especially in a small city like Austin.
I would like to stop reading someone’s tweets in peace, especially if the decision is likely to be temporary.
I would love to follow hundreds of people on Twitter, but I feel like anytime I start following more than a few people, someone starts spamming my stream with stuff I really don’t want to see. If I could filter what I’m getting, I would be fine. Since I can’t really filter, I have to be highly selective about who I follow. I don’t like holding people to a near perfect standard, but it’s the only thing I can do to save my sanity!
Sorry for the snark!
