Differentiating Attention: I wish Twitter had grouping

19 May 2008 · 2 comments

Or, I like some tweets better than others. After spotting this item in Read/WriteWeb — What People Say When They Tweet: Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is “chandraxray,” a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day. — I checked on who @chandraxray is following and found a couple [...]

Or, I like some tweets better than others.

After spotting this item in Read/WriteWeb — What People Say When They Tweet:

Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is “chandraxray,” a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day.

— I checked on who @chandraxray is following and found a couple of science and space Twitterers I might like to follow, in addition to those already on my list: @space, @science and @astronomy2009.

I already follow @MarsPhoenix, @jodrellbank and @BadAstronomer.

I prefer the real people

Just before adding them though I realised that what I’d like Twitter to give me is something I have for my RSS feeds: a way to group those I follow and check their feeds separately. My Twitter client, Twitterific, although excellent doesn’t offer this feature. I don’t know if any Twitter client does.

I’d see such a client as offering one tab per group. I could put my friends — tweets I’d like to read as they arrive — in one tab that I’d keep visible. In another tab I may have science and astronomy tweets, in yet another the current affairs / news service tweets and so on.

Broadly speaking, I care more about tweets from real human beings than I do the disembodied expressions of ‘topics’ and current events.

Instant or delayed attention

Then, instead of a single stream of undifferentiated tweets, some of which interest me more or more immediately than others, I could pay attention to some all the time, and to others some of the time, just by switching tabs.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

2 comments

Tagged as: groups, Twitter

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April 28 May 2008 at 14:42 57

What if you got another username and used that for your science tweets? Some twitter clients allow you to sign in with different names (although I haven’t tried them). Its not really grouping like folders but it might work.

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Miraz Jordan 30 May 2008 at 06:52 11

Thanks for the suggestion April. At the moment I’d rather have a mass of tweets from different sources than fuss around with different logins.

I put in a feature request to Twitterific and they tell me that although they aren’t planning ‘tabs’ as such they do have some thoughts on dealing with the problem I posted about.

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