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Comment by photorized | Hacker News Reader

I recently launched a Twitter app designed to filter out the noise by measuring the velocity of all tweets from all people I follow. It only shows me 5 things at any given moment that are most likely "interesting".

Check it out, it's free, and it only wants read-only auth permissions via Twitter: http://skim.io/

Still tweaking the algorithm.

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Years ago I did something kind of similar. I created my own Twitter client (never public and now defunct) but one of the features was that it would prevent one user from monopolizing my stream by hiding their posts after the three most recent. So say someone was live tweeting an event I would only see their three most recent, and after that it would display a collapsed bar to let me know it had hidden something.

Made skimming much easier, I still miss this feature.

pmarca would hate that feature, it would interfere with his tweet storms. :)

In all seriousness, noise is the biggest problem I have with twitter. When you follow more than 100 accounts, the timeline becomes pretty much useless.

Your comment gives me another idea for my app though - we will make it so each of the Top 5 is from a different unique publisher... and if more than one of their comments are trending, we choose the 'fastest'.

Just top 5? You're killing me!

This is exactly what I've always wanted from Twitter, I get too much noise. If you can provide a full feed that is balanced for each of the people I follow, that would be incredible.

I think we can do that, might include it in out next build.

Another thing I was considering - automatically categorizing tweets by topic and filtering them based on each person pre-sets. For example, I follow a bunch of VCs - and I want to see their comments about Bitcoin while ignoring comments about Secret.

Also - thinking about an ability to mute/ignore a given topic (e.g. Politics), keyword, or author (without unfollowing them). WDYT?

How about de-duping tweets that reference the same URL?

Yeah this would be great as well. I would love if it kept the one with the most replies.

That'd be useful as well, thanks.

I just realized that this app (as it is) would be great to have constantly running on a tablet next to my monitor. That way I can always glance over to the trending tweets from my feed.

This might be a use case that you could consider optimizing for. I'll try it out and see if it all fits on my screen or if scrolling is needed.

A friend had an idea to make a Twitter client that just drops half of all tweets at random. I don't think he ever got round to implementing it, but I thought it was quite a cool idea.

Same here: A friend and I actually batted around the idea of launching reader called "Every 3rd Tweet" -- seems to be a common problem.

cool. You should add the algorithm you use to our library ! :). I have some examples already implementing twitter4j.

That's an interesting idea, will check out your docs.

What do you mean by the velocity of tweets?

How quickly a given tweet is getting retweeted and favorited. So - not looking at absolute values but rather the rates at which those are changing. So that was actually quite a challenge, given Twitter's API constraints and rate limiting, and the math involved (we've tested edge cases on accounts with 100,000 'friends', and it still worked).

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