My Twitter-Fu is Better Than Yours

April 26, 2008

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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.