Twitter…..
Okay, line up to smack me. I’ve joined Twitter once again, and this time I’m going to stay on it by ruthlessly following only those people I think have the highest chance of saying something un-inane. You can follow me too if you like. I’ll keep my cynical, caustic, and useful tweets down to 5 a day maximum, I promise.
Why the change of heart? Am I not the “Die Twitter Die” guy? Well, it’s mostly because of what I witnessed at SxSW 2008 (the Zuckerberg-Lacey fiasco). Plus it is kind of irresistible to a snarkatron such as myself.
I still maintain that what Twitter needs is some kind of tag-based filtration system. In other words, I do want to follow you, but I only want to know if you’ve invented warp drive (or stumbled upon world peace) and not when you’re taking your kid to the park. Or, perhaps, I only want to hear from you during certain times of the day, or only on the weekends, or on Leap Days. Furthermore, there may be some use for some kind of broad categorizations, like rants, political content, or when something has a link in it (invariably to a web page trying to sell me something).
The on/off binary switch is just a bit too crude, but for now, I will use it with glee. Feel free to turn me off if I’m just too painful to endure. Particularly on days like today, as we stumble around in post-SXSW stupor.
I’ve been putting some serious thought into mobile Twitter clients lately… the ability to group twitter people into levels of importance is definitely something that I’d want to do. Usually, there’s not enough context in a twitter post to do any sort of automatic filtering, but I’d like the ability to but feeds on “sleep” status where I’d not get notified of new entries for a set period of time. I’d also like to audition people where I’d see their posts until a set date or set number have some through, then get prompted to continue. The API is out there.