Elanso

As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I'm used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the complaining blogger. But I think that Twitter is about to drive me crazy with information overload, and I think I know how to solve the problem. So here's a go.

Increasingly, Twitter has begin to feel like a collection of RSS feeds. My Twitter home screen is my personal newsreader. Unfortunately, it is completely dysfunctional. Some people I follow for personal reasons, some people I follow for work. Some people post often, some people once a week. I want to read every single message written by some people, and others can float by. Sort of like any other inbox, I guess.

If you've used Twitter, however, you know that all your messages go into the same place. Everyone is treated equal. There's no method to deal with the information overload inherent in the system, there's no way to mute over-Tweeters, there's no way to have any control over the information space.

This may have worked in the early days of Twitter, where the interaction was supposed to be ephemeral - some messages you caught, some float by, who cares. Unfortunately, Twitter has grown up as it became more mainstream. People are saying "Did you see my Tweet" just as they would say "Did you get my email."

We know how to deal with this: Folders, labels, mute buttons, regular expressions, etc. We need Tweetboxes, we need Tweetfolders to separate contexts, we need better strategies to deal with the information overload. And this is just in regards to incoming information - the multiple-audiences problem is another, more difficult problem.

Looking around at Twitter clients, I don't see any that support such functionality. But I'm not really interested in using a Twitter client - I just want Twitter's web interface to work. Let me create some folders, or tag my contact into a few different bins, so I could sort my incoming messages. A mute button would be nice as well, but right now folders (or labels, if you want to be Gmail-y) would really help. Look at the existing patterns that work with RSS and inboxes, and give us that. Because this current all-or-nothing isn't the right answer.