The timeline and the periphery.
When Twitter was first created, you could only write 140 characters of your own choosing. Now there are all sorts of other services that tweet on your own behalf, often without your noticing: Foursquare posts your checkins, Instagram posts your images, and all sorts of in-beta services tweet that you signed up for an invite. On the other hand, there are other apps that primarily exist to post your own content. The former I’ll call peripheral clients; the latter I’ll call timeline clients.
In order to make my timeline easier to read and understand, and in order to make my Twitter experience more about the things that I value in it, I run a timeline client that allows me to remove all tweets that are posted by specific client names. So I browse Twitter such that I can only read timeline clients.
As a result, my client-based filter list is formidable:
- Amazon
- Camera+
- Chill
- Colossal
- Fab iPhone
- Flickr
- foursquare
- Geeklist Inc
- Goodreads
- goscoville.com
- Gowalla
- HootSuite
- Instagram on iOS
- iTunes Ping
- Kinetik iOS
- last.fm
- LastfmLoveTweet
- Mashable Follow
- Mixel on iOS
- Momentile
- MyZeus
- Nike Application
- Nike+ GPS
- NYTimes on iOS
- Ohours.org
- Oink App
- Paper.li
- Posterous
- Rdio
- Readmill
- Retro Camera for Android
- RunKeeper
- Songkick
- SoundTracking
- SoundTracking on iOS
- Stamped for iPhone
- StumbleUpon
- The Visitor Widget
- Tumblr
- Turntable.fm
- Tweekly.fm
- Tweet Button
- twitterfeed
- Untappd
- With
- WordPress.com
- Words with Friends on iOS
- Year in Status
- Yelp
Thankfully, client-based blocking is effective at removing peripheral clients while preserving timeline clients.
Some scattered explanations:
- The worst offenders by far are foursquare and Instagram. They comprise around 20% of my unfiltered timeline. Draw your own conclusions.
- HootSuite: I know you can turn off the little ow.ly bar that appears on shortened links, but I disagree with its premise, and the whole client just skeezes me out writ large. Blocking HootSuite, a timeline client, poses the biggest risk that I’ll miss out on insightful, volitionally posted tweets from other people.
- Tweet Button: I don’t think link sharing should be reduced to the cognitive level of starring a tweet, and I prefer to read people’s thoughts on why they share the things they share, and what they have to say about it.
- Google and Facebook: Filtering these clients preserves only tweets from people who are posting specifically to Twitter. I don’t have a Facebook account and I never sign into Google+ (and would delete my account there if I didn’t think G+ accounts will become compulsory in the coming months).
- I turn off retweets from the vast majority of folks that I follow. I prefer to read what they have to say.
- My timeline client has hashtag blocking, but not string blocking, so I can only block e.g. conference hashtags that begin with a #. I desperately wish I could block any free text, e.g. 4sq, @Fab, deck.ly, rd.io, Herman Cain.
- When I see a new peripheral client hit my timeline, I block it. This doesn’t take much effort to maintain.
I feel like following somebody on Twitter has way too much importance attached to it, partly because we end up following every other internet-related product that they use as a result. We see all their posts on Instagram and Flickr and all their checkins and all the things that they Oinked or ifttted or whatever else.
But I want to keep my focus on what they have to say, and what we have to communicate to each other. Bringing excellent, like-minded people together is what makes Twitter great, and cutting out peripheral clients is a good way for me to do that better.
