Okay… so the average Twitter user probably has a small number of followers, but is following a LOT of people. Including “famous” people. I say “famous” in quotes because these folks are “Internet famous”, not “famous famous”. Internet Famous folks are the people who are famous on the Internet (aka Scoble, Arrington, Calcanis, etc) but my mom sure wouldn’t have a clue as to who they are. Many of these folks have like 14,000 followers, and also may be following 14,000 people for some narcissistic reason. As a result, they’re often responding to tons of their individual followers using the @ symbol, which results in a ton of half-sided conversation tweets from these folks. That’s fine, and good for them!
Unfortunately, most of these fall into the category of conversations I’m not interested in hearing the other half of. So, these tweets are essentially spam. Now, I could just stop following the folks who do this. But many of these people are writing interesting stuff sometimes, so I don’t want to miss out on that. Another side effect of Twitter spam is that, as tweets flow by on my Twitter client, I might miss tweets from folks I really care about who don’t tweet often. That’s not good.
This seems to be more of a problem when I’m catching up on Twitter after not having been on for a day hour or two.
So… here’s my request to solve this problem:
- Give me a way to put Twitter spammers into a special “view” in the client where they don’t drown out everyone else. I don’t know what this would look like… a folder? a tab? Who knows? Think creatively.
- Give me a way to put folks who don’t tweet often into a clearer view when they do. Again… not sure how on this one, but perhaps let those infrequent tweets bubble to the top of the timeline and stay there until I read them?
- Tell me I’m just an old fart on Twitter and that I should stick to e-mail as it already solves this problem.
