These days, I find myself using Twitter more and more to stay informed. By following a handful of thought leaders, tech luminaries, celebrities and friends, I get a steady stream of news, links to content around the web, opinions and even conversations. But as Twitter grows in popularity, it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out some of the noise.
Tweetdeck is a step in the right direction for removing the clutter unavoidable in this microblogging platform. It allows you to create groups and set up search notifications on any given topic. Each filter can be viewed in a separate column. Yet it does not nothing to eliminate noise – that is, tweets that don’t interest me.
So here is my idea. Why not add a social networking component to Twitter, like Digg or Reddit do for content? Tweets could be voted up or down and tagged as uninformative if they do not contribute to the conversation. An application like Tweetdeck could offer filters for only the highest ranked tweets from all my followers. Or I could run a search for only quality tweets (as decided by the Twitterati) from a particular topic.
I realize that the beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity, but the success of Tweetdeck clearly demonstrates that there is a market for more granular control. What do you think?
