Tag Archives: Twitter

How to control Twitter so it doesn’t control you

There are many ways to use Twitter, and I’m not about to tell you that my way is the only way, or even the best way. But I have refined my usage and feel pretty confident that it’s an efficient way to use the service, particular if you enjoy reading tweets as much or more than writing them.

My particular workflow prioritizes a few elements. If your priorities align with mine, then I think you’ll get quite a bit of value out of this post.

  • I’m interested in far more accounts than I can reasonably keep current on
  • Some of the accounts I follow post timely information that I want to see ASAP
  • For the accounts I follow that are higher-priority, I want to make sure I don’t miss any updates

Most Twitter users use the “stream of tweets” approach, that is to say that they dip into it here and there and read a few tweets, but make no effort to read all the tweets from any particular user as it’s just too overwhelming to try to do so. In fact, I think that’s how Twitter the company wants their users to use the service.

The benefit of the stream approach is simplicity: simply follow interesting Twitter accounts. The downside is a lack of control.

If—like me—you want to exert more control over your Twitter experience, the good news is that the tools to do so exist, and they’re really quite good. And don’t worry, it’s not really all that complicated.

What you’ll need

You’re going to need a few things to set this up properly. Basically, we’re going to make use of Twitter Lists, a free service called Tweet Marker, and some great Twitter clients that make good use of both of those things.

Twitter Lists

This is arguably the hardest step, which is that you’re going to need to think about the various Twitter accounts that you follow, and determine some high-level categories that you can group them into, then create Twitter Lists for those groupings. Don’t go crazy here, but do try to group them logically. Here are my groupings, for example:

  • Apps
  • Funny
  • General
  • Probation

Apps is for following the accounts of apps and services that I use, so that I get timely information when they release updates or new information about the product. Funny is for humorous accounts that I follow—for me this is a bit like the Sunday comics; light reading for when I feel like being amused. General is for accounts I follow that I’m interested in, but don’t care if I happen to miss some of their tweets. And Probation is for accounts that I think I might be interested in, but I’m not yet sure about.

Tweetbe.at

So how do you move everything around? Though Twitter doesn’t offer any mass-editing tools for managing the accounts you follow, there’s a 3rd-party website called Tweetbe.at that is pretty powerful, and can make the act of reorganizing your Twitter follows pretty painless.

First, you need to go to https://twitter.com/#!/yourusername/lists to make your lists (replace “yourusername” with your actual user name). I prefer to use private lists, but whether you want other people to be able to browse your lists is up to you. Once the lists have been created, head right over to Tweetbe.at.

Once you connect Tweetbe.at with you Twitter account, it will show you a list of the accounts you currently follow, which they call your “Following” list. From there, it’s a simple matter to go through and check the box beside the names of accounts that you’d like to move into lists, then click the “Add or Remove From Lists” button, and do select the list name that you’d like to add them to. Wait a few moments, and it will report back that it has completed the action. Then in the blue top bar, click Lists, then the name of the list you just added the accounts to, then click the Refresh button on the top right of the page. If the account names you added to this list successfully show up, you are now safe to select them all and click the Unfollow button so that they no longer show up in your main Twitter feed.

Once this is complete, you’re all set to read the Twitter accounts you follow grouped as you’ve categorized them, simply by reading the lists you’ve set up.

Tweet Marker

We’re going to switch gears for a second here, but bear with me.

Tweet Marker is a web service that adds a form of place-marking to Twitter. Basically, if you have a Twitter client that supports it, you can turn on the Tweet Marker feature, and it will automatically mark your position in your Twitter feed any time you stop reading. But what’s even cooler than that is that when you start reading your feed again—from any client (on any device) that supports Tweet Marker—you will automatically jump right to where you left off. It’s almost magical, and it makes staying on top of every post easily doable, provided you’re following a reasonable number of accounts.

Tweet Marker also works in Twitter Lists, so you can safely ignore your “Funny” list for a few days, then sit down and catch up on all the hilarity when you have time. Or you can treat your lists as streams and dip into them occasionally, without feeling the pressure to read everything.

Twitter clients that support lists and Tweet Marker

For all of this to work well, you need a Twitter client that has both Tweet Marker support, and solid Twitter Lists support. Here are my favourites in descending order of preference. All of them can do the trick, but the ones at the top of each list do it most elegantly, in my opinion. There are others listed at Tweet Marker, but if I haven’t listed them it’s either because I haven’t tried them, or I tried them and found their functionality lacking in some way.

iPhone

iPad

Mac

Web

Noticeably absent from this list are any of the official Twitter apps. It’s unlikely that they will add support for a 3rd party service like Tweet Marker. Further, with the departure of Loren Brichter (the original developer behind Tweetie, which was purchased and became the official iPhone Twitter app), Twitter has already made some changes to the iPhone Twitter that have made it uglier and less elegant, so much so that they just released another new version to try to fix it up a bit. In my opinion you’re better off finding a Twitter client by a good 3rd party developer that is dedicated to serving their user’s needs rather than the needs of the venture capitalists looking to recover their investment.

How to use Keyboard Maestro to add hotkeys for Twitter lists in Twitterrific

With the addition of Tweet Marker support, Twitterrific has become my go-to Twitter client on my Mac. Aside from Tweet Marker support, one of my favourite things about Twitterrific is its very well thought out set of keyboard shortcuts.

Unfortunately, though Twitterrific does a nice job supporting Twitter Lists, there are no keyboard shortcuts to switch your timeline view to look at them. There are keyboard shortcuts to switch to All Tweets (⌘1), Mentions (⌘2), Messages (⌘3), and Favorites (⌘4), but that’s it.

The good news is that you can use Keyboard Maestro to add in the missing keyboard shortcuts. You simply set up a set of macros that are available only in Twitterrific, then use the Move or Click Mouse action to click on the appropriate list. Since your macros will only run when Twitterrific is the active application, you can use ⌘5, ⌘6, etc. as your shortcuts.

I like to keep the sidebar hidden in Twitterrific, so I added the keystroke ⌘L before and after the automated click, which shows the sidebar just long enough to allow the action to occur.

Google+ needs headlines and other improvements to contend with Twitter

When Google+ was first announced, I couldn’t wait to give it a try. The hype was all good, and the tech elite that were first seeded with accounts couldn’t stop talking about how great the engagement level was on it. It seemed to have taken the best features from both Twitter and Facebook, mixed in some Google magic, and have produced a winner right out of the gate.

Within less than a week I had a Google+ account of my own, and I started to see what everyone was so excited about. The Circles feature that makes organizing your friends as straightforward as possible – and strong-arms you into doing so right from the outset whether you like it or not. The lack of any discernible post length constraint. The sense that Google is trying very hard to gain your confidence when it comes to privacy controls.

All good.

But as time wore on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right – that something isn’t right. And I think I know what it is.

Signal to noise ratio

First, I need to insert a short aside. When it comes to social media, there is always a balance to strike with respect to how much noise to tolerate in your stream. I’m defining noise as posts that are simply not of interest to you.

The thing is, people are people, and they rarely post only on one specific topic. There are people I follow on Twitter and Google+ that post stuff I find truly fascinating and can’t get enough of, but who also post stuff that couldn’t be less relevant to me. I’m willing to tolerate some noise from these people because the value of the signal is incredibly high. If I didn’t, I’d miss out on some very interesting content.

Headlines

While Google+ doesn’t put any constraints on how long a post can be, it also doesn’t encourage putting a title on longer posts. This is probably seen as a feature by Google; it’s one more bit of friction that they’ve removed from the sharing experience. Except that titles aren’t friction, they’re useful summaries.

Consider Twitter, which with its 140 character limit one could argue consists entirely of nothing but headlines. Sure, the person posting can link to a long blog post or article from Twitter, but to do so requires posting a tweet with the link and some kind of short descriptive text. And the operative word here is short. This forces the writer to find a succinct way to sell me on why I should bother clicking the link in their tweet.

What seems like a shortcoming – having to leave Twitter to go read a longer piece – is actually a feature. It forces me to evaluate the descriptive text in the Tweet (the headline) and decide, “Do I really want to take the time to go and read this article?” Often, more often than not in fact, I decide that my level of interest in the topic isn’t high enough to justify the excursion and reading time.

The small amount of friction introduced by having to leave Twitter (or, more likely, my Twitter client du jour) actually keeps my time reading my Twitter stream more focused. I still find the good stuff, but I do so while minimizing time wasted on topics I’m less interested in.

Again, what allows me to make these judgement calls? Limited-length headlines.

Contrast this to the Google+ stream which has posts of varying length, none of which provide any sort of summary to let me know if I should be interested in reading the whole thing or not. Frequently I find myself three or more paragraphs into a post, thinking to my self, “Do I care about this? Why am I still reading?”

Reading my stream in Google+ frequently makes me feel like I’m wasting my time in a way that Twitter does not.

Reading experience

Since I’m on my soapbox, I thought I’d throw in one more frustration I have with Google+, and that’s the actual reading experience. The Google+ website is good, but definitely not great. Google is moving to a new minimalist theme across most of their properties, and in Google+ the minimalism goes too far. It’s moved past “reducing clutter” and is in the “often inscrutable” zone. Some of this can be fixed by using browser extensions that change the way Google+ is presented, but the very existence of multiple extensions to improve Google+’s usability should be a hint.

And then there’s the issue of it being a web app rather than a native app. On the desktop Google has put all of their eggs in the “web app” basket, and to me that’s a real shame. As good as the Google+ web app is, it does some funky things, and over time I’ve felt an overall reduction in confidence while using it.

For example, when I click a link while reading Google+, I’m never confident that pressing the Back button will bring me back to where I was in my stream.

“But wait!” you say, “There are native Google+ apps, the Android and iPhone apps!” While I don’t have any experience with the Android Google+ app, the iPhone app is an abomination. It loads slowly, frequently crashes, the scrolling behavior feels about as wrong as it possibly could, and it’s missing important features like the ability to re-share posts. It basically feels like a web view wrapped in a hastily slapped together application. If I had to choose a word to describe it, that word would be “chintzy”.

As much as Twitter would rather not admit it, by far one of their biggest strengths and the reason their platform grew as fast as it did was the abundance of 3rd party Twitter clients for every platform imaginable. I’m talking about an embarrassment of riches; literally hundreds of apps, the cream of which represents a wide selection of solidly built and functionally rich experiences to choose from.

I have at least ten Twitter clients across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad that offer significantly better experiences than any Google+ experience I’ve yet had. This is not good news for Google. They need to prioritize the release of their API and get native app developers working on Google+ clients that offer better experiences than what Google is currently providing, and they need it yesterday.

Finally

Though you wouldn’t know it from reading this post, I’m not a Twitter fanboy. I’m not impressed by how they’ve handled themselves lately, and in particular I’m upset by the way they’ve treated the 3rd party app developers that helped them get to where they are. It’s clear that Twitter has gone from being a technology company that is interested in delivering a useful and disruptive service to their users, to a VC-directed corporation that is primarily interested in selling out their users and partners to try to make back some of the ridiculous amounts of money they’ve invested in the company.

I’m still cautiously optimistic that Google+ has a chance of being our white knight who will ride in and save us from the bean-counter ogres that are now running Twitter. But they’re not there yet, by a long shot.