Twitter Filters and Fonters: Static Lists and Dynamic Agents

I have only fooled with Twitter’s list a bit, but I am starting to get an insight to how they could allow me to fine tune the early warning system and social hot tub that Twitter principally is for me.

Yes, I have created a handful of lists, but mostly they have only a cursory few names in them. But then, I realized that there is a subset of Twitter accounts that make sense to relegate to big static contextual buckets, and to unfollow them. I am doing that with non-individuals, like software companies, airlines, news outlets, and food wagons. Why does this make sense?

1. My interest in what they are putting in front of me is highly variable. When I am in NYC and hungry, I am interested in NYC food trucks. Otherwise, I am not. 


2. Some of these accounts generate a gazillion posts a day: they seem to lack discernment about what is truly important, and of course there is no personalization in Twitter, per se (more about that later).


3. A bunch of what comes through from many of these accounts is retweets of other people saying nice things about them. I am happy that @anairline has made someone happy, but actually I am more interested in when people I know are happy, or sad, rather than @anairline blowing its own horn.

Immediately after I put @mashable into a new list called @stoweboyd/tech-news and unfollowed, a friend of mine pulled something out of the @mashable stream and tossed it over the list-based filter I had created. @sarahkennon acted as what I am now calling a fonter: she ‘filtered the post on’ to me.

So I now expect that I will diminish the number of accounts I am following, perhaps by as much as one quarter or one third. These will be relegated to lists, which I will open and look at contextually. I will catch up on all the airlines news at once, once in a while, or when I am thinking about travel.

Note that some big news breaking at @jetblue will still reach me in moments, because other people will see some breaking news about @jetblue and fonter it to me. This is the personalization of the twittersphere: the socialization of news through personal connections, personal relationships.

The good fonterers make the best Twitter friends. I will always depend upon the kindess of fonterers.

I would also like to see dynamic agents: on-the-fly lists created by algorithm based on those tweeting about a breaking meme or hashtag. For the moment, we will have to do with static lists as filters, and dynamic agents, real people, as fonters.