As many people I’ve started to use Tweetdeck yesterday and I must say that it really makes my life easier and I wish I would have this interface also for FriendFeed. Why?
To many friends
The basic problem is the inflationary use of the term “friends” and that everybody you add is a friend without distinctions. That causes on Twitter and on FriendFeed just to much noise. Quite a few people have solved this problem by not following everybody anymore who follows them, but only people who are interesting or who they really know.
Well - If I would do that, I think I would miss interesting things (and maybe it’s even a bit impolite) - because my assumption is: when somebody follows me, he is interested in what I am interested in and therefore he of course could add a value to the conversation - except he is a spammer.
And I must say that from time to time I also find pretty interesting stuff via people I follow who I absolutely don’t know at all. Just from a quick check of somebody’s profile (and I check it everytime) you just can’t always say, if he is interesting or not. Some have good bio’s on Twitter - and if the bio proofs that he is working or interested in the same branch as I do i.e. I follow him for sure.
But in the end: it’s to much noise - I also follow RL friends on Twitter and I of course follow people who are valuable for my work etc. and due to the noise I miss them quite often and Tweetdeck now solves this problem for me on Twitter in a practicable way.
Groups and Searches
Nothing new in general, but the Tweetdeck interface now makes it working for me in my day to day working life. I created shortlists with people who I don’t wanna miss on Twitter. I follow by myself about 350 people (I know - that’s not much) but with this groups I have my personal “VIPs” now in a separate column and don’t miss what they are saying.
Pretty nice - I also have several search-columns now, to not miss conversations I am interested in. So all in all - Tweetdeck could really solve a major issue for me: it reduced the noise - even if the interface maybe looks at first glance like more noise 
What about FriendFeed Interfaces
So what would be great to get this kind of column based interface, in which I can create different groups - also for FriendFeed, because I would use it simply the same way.
Creating shortlist of the people, who are important for me. Creating searches (if that would be possible in general) and in the end just creating me more precise filters for me, to keep on track, with what I want to know.
3 responses so far ↓
1 olli // Jul 6, 2008 at 3:11 pm
as you mention, the use of the word “friend” is a bit inflationary in web2.0-world. somehow it seems that non-friends aren’t of any imprtance. in the web. but why? when i get something in the supermarket i don’t cue in the line of “friends of this supermarket” and i wouldn’t react to anyone shouting “hey my friend, follow me” at me.
(i think spreeblick-johnny once wrote about it) it would be more honest and less noisy, if one could differentiat between friend, family, colleague and others by default. in everyday life you normaly don’t get involved in every chat while walking down the streets.
the next step might be combining all your contacts with different tags, like if they mention something of further interest for you, they pop up on your list, so that you don’t need to set up an extra list for certain people.
for example: a workmate from your first company long times ago writes something about his favourite footballclub, but this information won’t get to you, as you’re only interested in his updates about his life. but if he writes something about your next company, you get an update, cause “next company” is one of your tags.
that sounds a bit like your solution, but that might also be because i’m writing this in english *g*
2 Sebastian // Jul 6, 2008 at 3:32 pm
what i think is essential is the twitter-in-twitter functionality: i don’t have to go someplace else to see what happens in my twitterverse, especially with the number of accounts I am working
3 Sebastian Küpers // Jul 6, 2008 at 3:33 pm
@olli - thanks for the great comment! and very good example with the supermarket. and yeah - tagging could also be a very nice way to also reduce the noice on these platforms.
I would say that hash-tags already head in this direction, but I know what you are talking about - that would be something different.
pretty good ideas and that would be a much better solution, than creating list manually!
btw there is also a microformat “XFN” which would support this differentation - you can already use it on wordpress blogs, when you add links to your blogroll, to define what kind of contact it is you are linking there. (just scroll down to see it)
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