As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I’m used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the complaining blogger. But I think that Twitter is about to drive me crazy with information overload, and I think I know how to solve the problem. So here’s a go.
Increasingly, Twitter has begin to feel like a collection of RSS feeds. My Twitter home screen is my personal newsreader. Unfortunately, it is completely dysfunctional. Some people I follow for personal reasons, some people I follow for work. Some people post often, some people once a week. I want to read every single message written by some people, and others can float by. Sort of like any other inbox, I guess.
If you’ve used Twitter, however, you know that all your messages go into the same place. Everyone is treated equal. There’s no method to deal with the information overload inherent in the system, there’s no way to mute over-Tweeters, there’s no way to have any control over the information space.
This may have worked in the early days of Twitter, where the interaction was supposed to be ephemeral – some messages you caught, some float by, who cares. Unfortunately, Twitter has grown up as it became more mainstream. People are saying “Did you see my Tweet” just as they would say “Did you get my email.”
We know how to deal with this: Folders, labels, mute buttons, regular expressions, etc. We need Tweetboxes, we need Tweetfolders to separate contexts, we need better strategies to deal with the information overload. And this is just in regards to incoming information – the multiple-audiences problem is another, more difficult problem.
Looking around at Twitter clients, I don’t see any that support such functionality. But I’m not really interested in using a Twitter client – I just want Twitter’s web interface to work. Let me create some folders, or tag my contact into a few different bins, so I could sort my incoming messages. A mute button would be nice as well, but right now folders (or labels, if you want to be Gmail-y) would really help. Look at the existing patterns that work with RSS and inboxes, and give us that. Because this current all-or-nothing isn’t the right answer.
Tags: information, twitter
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
I’d love to say Amen, and I would — but Twitter has though of that, I think, and decided against it at first, because simplicity was the way, and features wouldn’t make the mobile experience work. They tried to implement some word-based search engine, but it sounds broken, or at least not suited to context management.
What I do is I have two Twitters account. The problem is obviously that onoly one can have the cell phone number associated to it — the personal/party one; the feed-like that comments on my PhD is better suited to desktop any way.
Any one with more then one feed can use “Twhirl”, but I doubt more then two is convenient. Allowing several Twitter accounts from one mobile would be useful, although having to tell one context from another. . . Maybe several numbers, and allow the user to associate one to each account; that way, you can label them differently in your contact list.
Maybe having several services is actually better: Jaiku, Frazr, etc. I use Facebook status a lot like Twitter, but that is only because more of my friends are there.
Oh, and to all the young coders out there: am I wrong to think that “complainer” is a thing of the past, and you are glad to have suggestions? Some people are rude (certainly not Fred), but besides the swear words, doesn’t any old-fart mumbling out-weights any survey? Or is a a pain to have someone figure out the drawback and make everybody realize it?
I think their philosophy is and has been to provide and infrastructure, and to have other people provide more advanced functionality (in the clients, in the many Twitter apps…).
Your needs might not be other users’ needs, and implementing the requested functionality might make the interface complex and bloated for other users…
As for not-to-miss info: I think you should use RSS for that :-).
As for filtering: if more people have the same issues, more scripts like this will show up: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/20614
Sigh, Bertil nailed it while I was still typing my comment and struggling with the CAPTCHA…
I have two accounts as well for my IMBob and SmsAlice personas, as described here:
http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2007/05/13/phone-versus-laptop-lifestyle-twitter-for-alice-and-bob/
Use two accounts, use RSS, rely on others – don’t get me wrong, I’m mindful of the whole extreme simplicity thing, but I would argue that there’s a real problem here (and I don’t disagree that my needs are different from other users – we’re all unique snowflakes).
Case in point is this emergent behavior of following-hyper twittering folks like Scoble or Calcanis. At the cost of personal connections, people are subscribing to a cluttered stream of posts from A-list folks. This is actually somewhat of a troubling trend for Twitter – how often are you really going to log in if all you see are posts from some web-head (even if your friends are also posting)?
There are any number of approaches twitter can take to sorting without dramatically changing the interface. Tabbed views, ajax – we’ve solved all these problems. These are the friend lists that Facebook realized they needed after the fact, friend lists that LJ always had.
Part of the reason I’m raising the issue is because I think it is a serious problem for Twitter’s business model. We care about personal connections more than we do web-heads, and Twitter needs to think seriously about how to best deliver that personal content to us. Its a bigger problem than one might imagine.
And regarding the extreme simplicity – Twitter works because the object of experience is simple. The UI is a completely different story.
I’m not sure I want Twitter fixing this all by themselves. As others have mentioned, the simplicity of the service is kinda nice.
One of the really great things about Twitter is the ecology of tools surrounding it, and I wonder if there’s a place in that ecology for the tool you’re looking for. Of course, the Twitter API may be insufficient to create a meaningful solution, but seems like it’s worth a shot.
Of course, “simplicity” is a loaded term in design. Fred, you pointed out that it’s the “object of experience” in Twitter that’s simple — not necessarily the UI — and I think you’re right. I’m worried that adding greater control into the UI will fundamentally change the underlying interaction model, turning it into some kind of weird email client with teeny tiny messages.
I knew I was stepping into dangerous territory here – but I’m not really advocating changing Twitter (well, a must button would be a new feature). Rather, I’m just looking for a way to create an information overlay that will help me sort messages. Folksonomy could solve this problem easily. Let me tag some people with work, some with A-list, some with personal. Generate views based on that if I ask for it.
On the ecology standpoint, yeah, I could probably design a tool to do this, so I hear that. My larger point that the UI, as is, presents some serious problems to both new adopters and longtime users. New adopters face the problem of overload from non-personal contacts, longtime users can’t keep up with everyone. Simplicity does not have to mean that the system fails, plain and simple.
Oops – I meant mute button. And for the record, I think you’re right Jackson. I don’t want radical change or overhaul, just the ability to opt-in to a feature if I choose to do so.
I’m guessing that the achilles heel of the “build it yourself” solution will be the lack of tagging on accounts and tweets. You’d have to maintain that yourself, meaning the data isn’t portable :(
I disagree a tiny bit that the existing UI is bad for new adopters — I suspect that the first instinct of most users is to follow their friends, co-workers, etc. For this kind of use, I think the current UI is OK. Of course, I barely use the website, so I’m probably not in any position to comment on it.
*Then* they’ll run across the A-listers, get bombarded with millions of useless replies, and (if they’re smart) drop the A-listers with extreme prejudice. If it isn’t there — and I think it is — I would be all for on option that says “ignore replies that aren’t too me”.
It’s the users who have been using Twitter for a while and have created a motley collection of people they follow that I think suffer the most. Like yourself, they’re the ones dealing with the cross-pollution of social contexts and the desire/need to separate out those people who they want to communicate with vs. those they only want to follow.
at blip.pl (Polish) microblogging site which is quite active, we have hashtags (#tag) built in. you can subscribe to all messages with some #tag (regardless if you follow the sender) or ignore all messages marked with #tag. it helps a lot with information overload, particulary during events like sport games and so on.
I think you’re right Jackson – A-listers are sort of my proxy for Twitterbombers. There are a couple of people I know who I’ve had to stop following, just because they take over my feed. So even if you ignore the A-list, this problem is still there.
And actually, the fact it is a problem is problematic. If you want to tweet 5 times an hour, that should be OK. I tweet 2x a day or less, and the system should also support 1x a week tweeters. And if I can mark a Tweet as a fave, why I can’t I do the same to a person. Sorting it already built in, lets just extend it a little bit more.
“[...] the object of experience is simple. The UI is a completely different story.”
Completely agree with you: remember early Twitter? It was simple, but no way the UI was right.
What you describe can easily be done with three accounts: call your personal one “fredz” and ask your friends (those who are not your colleagues) to switch; have all your A-listers on another one, called whatever, but they are public anyway; use Twhirl, and mute whichever you need (There *is* a mute button, three actually: send “Stop”, “Pause” or “Mute” if I remember properly, they do different things)
Hash tags are fine, but unless everybody agrees on what means what — and this is not going to happen: just what do you think Scoble deems “#Urgent”? — forget about it.