Caitlin Woodward

Twitter is great. We all love twitter. It's simple, and that's what is great about it. It does not have a lot of features, but that is usually fixed by a third party app. There is one major feature, however, that I feel is missing and would have to be implemented by Twitter themselves. Filters.

Currently you have two privacy options, public and locked. If your setting is public, anyone can read your tweets. If it is locked, then that means only the people that follow you can see your tweets. I think that there needs to be more levels that are custom. What if I don't want the people at work to read details about my weekend out, but I still want to tweet to the rest of my friends about stuff? What if I want to complain about my boyfriend to my twitter friends, but I don't want him to see? Or even, I would like to create a Memphis filter, so all of my out of town friends don't have to get spammed with tweets about Memphis; they don't care about where we're meeting for lunch. I would also like to create a "tech filter", so I don't have to bother my non web developer friends about helping me with a CSS bug.

And LiveJournal, one of our very first social networks, has had this feature since its birth.

In your settings, you'd be able to create groups. It'd be very simple, it would show you a list of everyone you are following, and you could pick and choose who goes into your group. Here's a screenshot of how you can currently manage groups from the LiveJournal backend. It's even very primitive as far as look and javascript-y goodness goes.

On the web interface, Twitter could put a little icon next to the update button, that allows you choose a specific filter for that tweet. Or, for the people who text, you would have to be able to assign each of your groups a short code. Obviously, there would be some reserved codes, for example 'd', which is already used for direct messaging. But I could assign my Memphis group the short code 'm', work would be 'w', all the girls would be 'g', web developers would 'wd', I could go on.

And the same thing goes for reading, too. At least in the web interface. There would be a tab on the right titled "Groups" or something, where I could go and read a twitter feed for a specific group. It would make it so much easier to assign who I get text updates from. Instead of going to about fifteen different pages, I could just go into my settings, and tell it that I would like to receive text updates from my close friends filter.

Filters would give the people to opportunity to tweet more, since they don't feel like they have to be reserved because there is that one person out there who might read it. It would allow people to follow more people, since they know that they could filter those people that they don't want to read.

I think the world would be a little friendlier with Twitter filters.