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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.