The World According to Wentz: #OldFailLady

• Apr 8th, 2010
• Posted by Andy W.
• Posted in Bad Ideas, Facts, Open Letter, Social Media, Twitter

Dear Mr. Nick Bilton,

This letter is in response to your New York Times article entitled “Twitter Needs More Filters.”  Typically I appreciate when the mainstream media prints geeky rants generally reserved for tech-bloggers, but in this case, your article appears a little off-base. What Twitter users are missing is not a lack of filters but a lack of knowledge of the tools available to use in concert with Twitter and the native tools within it.

Let’s start with the search tool within Twitter. As you mentioned, the service can become overrun with trending topics like “SXSW”, “iPad” and the omnipresent “Justin Bieber” (my heart skipped a beat when I was typing his name!). The answer to your troubles here is as simple as a minus sign (-). Let’s say this past weekend you were searching Twitter for the “Big Apple” to find something fun to do on Saturday night in NYC but all you were getting were users’ tweets about how long they’ve been waiting in line to buy a plus-size iPhone.  Simply use the (-) limiter like this: “Big Apple – iPad” and you will get the results you wanted sans the Apple fanboys. Mess around with Advanced Search at http://www.search.twitter.com and learn other cool search limiters like date range and retweet exclusion.

So how do you manage your friends’ updates? Adding more features to Twitter will only spawn more Failwhales. The beauty of the service is its lack of bloat; they leave that to the app developers. Use clients to create groups, alerts and more with tools like TweetDeck and CoTweet. Who goes to http://www.twitter.com anymore anyway? Clients are a light-weight and (usually) free way to manage your feeds. I know that you were looking for a way to filter your friends’ feeds down within Twitter but unfortunately, that’s not part of the service.  Take TweetDeck for a spin and I promise you that you’ll find a Twitter user experience unlike any you’ve had before.

Cordially yours,

@Frenchtron300