This is interesting.
Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?
Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?
Twitter at its best is short succinct one liners that quickly summarize the content you want the world to see with links that take you to the long form, and you only go there when the tweet conveys its something that will probably interest you.
The second you start writing stuff longer than 140 chars it gets too long to quickly scan a stream and find the stuff you are really interested in to spend your time on. People who want more than 140 charts on Twitter are NUTS. It would destroy the whole point and the beauty of the thing, they totally don't get the concept.
My client puts the people I am following in a bar on the left prioritized by the ones I like and read the most. @newsyc50 and @newsycombinator are at the top, along with @slashdot. I alwsys tap them first thing every day and I get EXACTLY what Malda was asking for, the top posts on Hacker News recently with no noise. @newsyc50 has links to the Hacker News comments and I go to them on topics that really interest me.
I scroll down my avatar bar and look at other people I follow that aren't as consistently interesting when time permits.
Twitter, if you get a good client, and spend time finding and following the right things, gets you all the news and info you could want, and you only get noise if you want it. I look at my whole stream to get a pulse of what's happening, or for the occasional serendipity, otherwise I just look at the streams of the things I am consistently interested in.
Twitter is a beautiful thing, Dorsey deserves a billion for it. Unfortunately the current Twitter and its executive team have been pretty ghastly for a while, but that's usually what happens when a company heads to IPO.
Of course, that's how I would do it as a third-party developer. Will Twitter ever support this? Doubt it. I don't think it's relevant to enough users to implement that kind of feature. Most people who use Twitter evidently enjoy reading what Justin Anniston and Jennifer Bieber eat for breakfast.
I'm a big NHL fan, so I'll check out fancloud.com.
If the system analyzed the links you clicked on (via the t.co URL shortener Twitter operates), the links you posted, and the topics you tweeted about, they could build a profile of interest for you and highlight those tweets.
Their current 'you should check this out' system on twitter.com and in the twitter client seems to be 'hey, here's some stuff everyone else likes', which (the last time I looked at it) was complete tripe about idiotic topics that 'the masses' care about, with nothing about the sort of tech news or political/economic interest that I tend to prefer, but I feel like a personalized feed is something that would be far more useful to me, and probably many other people.
How can the service differenciate? My interests differ from your interests.
Often I see people re-post the same message if they think it will have value to their followers simply because not everyone is online at the same time.