Open Letter to Twitter

Dear Twitter,

I use Twitter every day. I try to maintain my follow count around 1,000 so my home feed doesn’t go crazy. Those are the accounts that I’m interested in, but I probably don’t want to see every single tweet from every single account. And it is obviously overwhelming to go through all of their tweets every day.

How can I find the most important and/or interesting tweets first, and read the rest only if I have more time?

My first solution was to create a list, called “Should Read”, and put my favorite accounts into that list. When I open Twitter, I would go to that list first, and then my home feed. Sometimes I see a really good tweet, and put its author to this list, but more often that not, it’s too soon to do that.

After a while, that list became too big itself, and it’s too much work to clean it up. So I had to pull my favorites of favorites from “Should Read” and create a new list, called “Must Read”:

As you may have expected, that list became too big as well. So I pulled my favorites of favorites of favorites from “Must Read” and created yet another list, called “Never Miss”:

My strategy is to read “Never Miss” first, and then “Must Read”, and “Should Read”, and if I still have time, read the full feed. It is not a pleasant experience since Twitter’s official app poorly supports switching between lists.

More often than not, I read “Never Miss”, and then go to “Friends” (yes, that’s another list) and switch to social mode.

The “Never Miss” list is also growing fast. Today, I heard from Brian, Stephanie and Tyler that the Twitter App allows me to get push notifications from any individual user. Yay! I have another “list” to create now.

Maybe I could call it “Never Ever Miss”.

It sort of works so far, but I really really wish you could do it for me, automatically.

Thanks,
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