Twitter

Recently, actually for the past year, I’ve not been following anyone new on twitter. I use twitter as a work information stream, but I’ve been frustrated by the number of tweets unrelated to the work. Now I know that everyone uses twitter in their own way, and I also know some prefer to blend their tweets preferring the more holistic picture this presents. But for me it’s all about work, and Facebook is all about friends.

So the first order of business for ‘search-gear’ is to provide a one email per day summary of the tweets I should know about and may want to pursue further.

So what indicators are there that this is a ‘relevant’ tweet?

Does it contain a url which does not resolve to an image?
Does it contain a hashtag I deem as interesting, but am not explicitly following?
Has it been retweeted? This can be used to rank importance as well as a measure of interest.
Does it mention someone explicitly using a their twitter name?

Using these, all be it crude, indicators I’d hope to summarise my stream, list all hashtags used as a tag-cloud, and include a list of unknown, but mentioned twitter users who may be worth following.

In the future I may also keep a list of users I follow with a tweet/relevant ratio ordered in such I way that I can think of discarding people I follow with tweets not relevant to my interests. And I will also want to summarise a hashtag, or at least keep an eye on it year in year out even if it changes – for instance, W4A2014 -> W4A15 which would imply W4Ayyyy OR W4Ayy.