What's the best way to follow Twitter

[vimes]

I'm pretty much all thumbs when it comes to following twits and conversation on twitters, and it seems I'm missing out on a few things from IdleThumbs and other people.

So, I was wondering if you guys were using any widget/plugin/stuff that helped you sort out all of this. I've been using the twitter widget from netvibes and tried to use twitter page itself, but I found that having those buried in one of my browser's tab didn't help.

[toblix]

I have a tab with this web site pinned in my browser, and regularly check it for new updates throughout the day.

[MrHoatzin]

I also use this esoteric "twitter.com" website for my tweeting needs. There is also an app that lives on my phone and causes me to type wacky typos that I never notice before I send them.

[vimes]

So I guess, the "There is no stupid question" adage goes out of the window in the very situation you need it most, eh ?

I'll be checking that TWITTER.COM you all seem so fond of.

More seriously: I've got a 7 tab Firefox running for all my non-working needs and an 8-tab chrome for all the dashboards, issue trackers and other work related shenaniggans. So having an extra tab doesn't seem the best option.

Ah well, nevermind.

[Hermie]

I've been using Tweetdeck for a long time, because of the column layout, but I miss from the official twitter stuff being able to click on a tweet to see the previous conversation.

[elmuerte]

I mostly read twitter feeds from my phone during my commute. And in the weekend I just visit twitter.com

[Grufff]

The Echofon Firefox add-on works quite nicely. You can set the twitter feed to Windowed, Sidebar or Panel mode, and get pop-up alerts of new tweets. Makes it easier to track things with multiple tabs open.

[AteBit]

Tweetbot is the best twitter client on iOS (IMO).

[Salacious Snake]

  On 6/12/2012 at 12:36 PM, vimes said:

I'm pretty much all thumbs when it comes to following twits and conversation on twitters, and it seems I'm missing out on a few things from IdleThumbs and other people.

If the issue is that you don't want the good tweets to get scrolled off your timeline by the noise before you see them, I can think of two good solutions. The first is to unfollow a bunch of people so there's less noise, and the second is to use twitter's list feature.

If you click on the, uh, action button (I don't know what to call this shit, their interface makes no sense) on a person's profile, you can add them to a list (or create one). Add your favorite tweeters to a list, and it'll be much easier to get caught up on their stuff.

Following conversations is never great… the website (and apps like tweetbot) will attempt to thread things when you click on them/swipe them to expand the conversation, but that depends on people using replies in the expected manner. Things often get broken.

[Donk]

Seconding list features. My Twitter feed is rather busy, some people tweet a lot and some people once a week and the slow tweeters tend to get lost. So I put everyone I follow into a twitter list. Friends, work, humor (comedians, fake accounts etc), music, science, sports, game press people (Giant bomb, Thumbs etc), games industry people (Molyneux, Carmack etc).

[jeremywc]

I just spent the last few days doing some heavy cleaning on my Twitter account and I'm much happier with it. I was up to following almost 400 accounts and it got to a point where I wasn't getting anything out of it unless I stayed glued to Twitter all day. The first thing I did was unfollow most of the news, corporate, and political Twitter accounts. Those types of accounts tend to be filled with links and hashtags that I find too distracting. Then I went about aggressively unfollowing people who posted stuff that I just didn't find interesting. Example: At one point I had a lot of athletes from the various Houston sports teams. Those guys post a lot, but very little of it was anything I cared to be kept up to date on. Mostly it's just trash talking with other athletes and responding to fans.

After that, I organized everyone so they were only in one list each and cut my lists down from around ~20 to 6. The best part of doing that was it forced me to think about what kind of information I wanted to get out of Twitter and prune any accounts I felt didn't meet those requirements. Once I had everyone organized into lists, I switched from using the main twitter.com UI to TweetDeck in my browser. Instead of viewing one big feed, I have 6 feeds for each list I created. I ordered the lists left to right from most frequently updated to least. This works great and I'm back to where I can jump on Twitter a few times a day and feel caught up.

[toblix]

So now you have 36 feeds?

I'm at the point where I'm following a few too many people, and spend too much time rewinding to catch every little tweet. Luckily I don't have anything better to do.

[gregbrown]

As someone who works from home, I use twitter as a replacement for office chat. It's also incredibly handy as a weird ambient awareness of everything else that's happening elsewhere in the world. You just have to be really judicious about keeping your twitter list clean, and finding out what works best for you. I tend to read everything, but others treat it like a firehose and not an inbox.

[jeremywc]

  On 6/14/2012 at 8:08 PM, toblix said:

So now you have 36 feeds?

No, sorry, that was worded badly. Just 6 feeds in Tweetdeck, one for each list.

[toblix]

That makes tons of sense. So, tell me about lists – what are they?