My Twitter-Fu is Better Than Yours

26 Apr 2008

twitter_logo.jpg (JPEG Image, 800x295 pixels)

Twitter has become part of my daily routine here at bwana.world, and I’ve found that while there are many interesting people on it, I don’t want to know everything about them. There are plenty of people who love to use Twitter to follow everyone that follows them. While I understand some of their reasoning, I don’t agree with taking in all that personal data from others as it is my belief that it can affect you. As with most technologies I use on the web, there must be some sort of filter or sanity. It’s true with FriendFeed, and it’s true with Twitter.

I want to share with you my technique for using Twitter. I don’t expect everyone who reads this to agree with it, but I do hope you find some bit of knowledge you didn’t already know. The technique I use is simple: Separate personal twitter from the overall noise. In order to do this, I use two programs: twhirl and Adium. One is an Adobe Air client, the other is a Google talk interface to Twitter.

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With twhirl, I send tweets and reply to conversations. With it’s all-in-one timeline, I can easily see who is talking to me and respond quickly. I also have all the features of twhirl at my disposal for searching, dealing with links, posting pictures and more.

With Adium, I use Twitters “track” feature to track certain keywords. This technique allows me to filter the massive amounts of data twitter has to offer, for keywords I am interested in. This may vary from day to day, but it easily changeable within Adium.

This video demonstrates and explains more:

So why use two programs instead of one? It’s easy. I’d rather use twhirl’s interface for creating and responding, but Adium barely gets touched. I only touch Adium when I click on a link or I add/remove a tracking term. It’s not as bad as it seems, but the reward is great. I get to sift through a LOT of noise, and have plenty of meaningful discussions, find new links, find new people, and do it all with a pleasant interface and a global filter. That’s it in a nutshell.

So what do you think? How do you use Twitter? Please leave a text or video comment as I’m open to new ideas.

Tags: friendfeed, Software, twitter, Utility, web2.0

4 Responses to My Twitter-Fu is Better Than Yours

tommyl

April 26th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

Thanks for the Adium tip; I hadn’t known how to track stuff in IM. Saves me from going to the browser too often to pull up Summize for looking stuff up.

tommyls last blog post..Less Television, More Media

Harold

April 27th, 2008 at 12:17 pm

Cool, Bwana. Nice tip. So how are you enjoying the NFL draft so far?

Harolds last blog post..

After 4 Months, Has Twitter Improved? | Bwana.org

September 10th, 2008 at 11:57 am

[...] has had issues with their XMPP Instant Messaging (IM) feature and their Track feature. I went on record to state that these features were my primary way to use Twitter. Guess what? Twitter IM and Track [...]

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