#“Business Priorities vs Customer Needs”
There appears to be a bigger and bigger disconnect between the needs of Twitter users and the providers of Twitter clients (including Twitter's own web interface). As more & more people join and more & more connections are made, the level of noise increases daily. We've all known this from the very start, a single CB radio channel doesn't scale or more importantly, people don't scale.
Traditionally (2007!), the answer was always to unfollow people to control the flow. But that makes no sense when it's subjects that are the problem not the people.
Whilst the torrent from the firehouse becomes ever more unmanageable, what is the Twitter ecosystem doing? Creating information discovery tools! Channels, lists, trends, tag clouds, sponsored tweets, blah, blah, noise, more noise, more noise, just read Twitter 24 hours a day.
What do we need? Information filtering tools. A powerful suite of functions to strip out all the crap we don't care about whilst still enabling us to communicate with people we like. I laughed out loud last night when I tried the Tweetcaster "filter" on Android when I discovered that it shows only the tweets with the filter words, rather than removing them? Are the effing kidding me? Who the hell needs that?
There is a very simple reason why they are all focused on discovery instead of filtering - lazy ads. There is less money to be made in hiding information from people than from pushing crap to them that they don't want. So they are all trying to figure out ways of showing us more.
All of my World Cup and Eurovision posts on this topic were lighthearted but very serious behind it. We need these tools. The only one that is currently remotely usuable is Tweetdeck with its single shitty global filter. Some of the others (yes you Seesmic Web) have hilariously bad ones where you have to add each word as a separate rule! Quite clearly the people building these tools are not heavy Twitter users.
There should be a simple rule of thumb, unless you follow more than 200 people on Twitter, you should not be writing Twitter clients.
I specced a Twitter client last year built entirely around the concept of a stack of filters. Each filter consisting of anything from single word, to a boolean to a complex regex. The stack had its own column beside the usual columns in e.g. Tweetdeck. The filters could be toggled on/off with a single click. A filter economy based on micro-payments could be created. "Saturday UK Sports Filter" "Glastonbury Filter" "Late Late Show Filter" "Thanksgiving Filter" "Twitter Offer of the Day Retweet Filter" "People I don't like who get constantly retweeted Filter" etc etc. I'll never build it, I wish someone would. We would all pay. Quite a bit.