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Comment by lftl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You can do that on Facebook: when posting a status update, the drop-down box under the lock icon has a "Customize" option, which will pop up a dialog where you can select specific people or pre-created lists of friends for it to be visible to (the lists function essentially as channels, like "colleagues" or "family"). You can also set one of those channels as the default. I know a few people who do that fairly regularly to separate friends vs. colleagues vs. family updates. But it's a bit of a hassle and sort of buried.

For Twitter, I know a few people who have two Twitter accounts, a "work" and a "personal" one. Also somewhat of a hassle, though maybe actually less of one.

Not only is it a hassle, but it requires the broadcaster to set the preferences for content rather than the recipient.

That's close, but not exactly the same thing as selecting people to publish to. If I set a post to go to the "Tech People" friend list on Facebook, none of my other friends can see it, nor can the general public. I'm okay with everyone seeing it; I just don't want to pollute people's news feeds with things I know they won't be interested in.

I don't think that's a solution because it assumes everyone would agree that X is for personal posts, Y for professonal, etc. I don't think that kind of agreement will ever come about. I believe in filters but all the ones currently out there aren't at the right level of granularity. It's not about the service, the person, the list, or the search result. The update itself is the right granularity to consider for relevance (as this blog post shows).

Just have two twitter accounts: lftl_business and lftl_personal.

In theory you could use multiple Twitter accounts for multiple channels. It would be sort of faking it, though.

you could also use twitter lists.

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