Comment by alabut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alabut | Hacker News Reader

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The new Facebook homepage layout is similar to a change Twitter made last year as well - moving the filters from horizontal tabs above the feed to a vertical one running next to it. It's a bit more obvious when you look at the current and upcoming layouts side-by-side:

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/newprof...

Twitter made an identical change in September of last year, described in their blog post here:

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/09/changes-afoot.html

The interesting thing is that the rationale is exactly the same for both companies, yet Facebook users already have the ability to form adhoc groups and filters of their contacts, whereas Twitter doesn't. It's probably a big part of the reason why my Facebook friend list feels pretty manageable at close to 300 people, yet following a similar number of people on Twitter drives me a bit nuts and my Twitter feed increasingly feels like a crazy RSS reader with only big giant folder and no sorting abilities. I've been trying to deal with the info firehouse overload by going old school with browser bookmarks and grouping twitter pages by "friends", "designers", "San Francisco", etc.

Have you tried TweetDeck? The 'group' by searching feature is pretty good.

Also, the other suggested solution is to consider using different twitter accounts for different groups of people...

That's a great tip, I've probably gone as far as I can go organization-wise with the browser and w/o using a dedicated twitter client.

The problem with tweetdeck and twhirl and whatever else is that it turns twitter into IM, something constantly on that I have to check and that pops up alerts. I guess you could turn that stuff off, so that's what I'll experiment with.

I've recently gone back to Tweetdeck having tried it when it was first in beta. It's not perfect, but the groups feature is great and I find I'm able to handle following a lot more people because of it.

I've turned off all alerts from Tweetdeck so it doesn't bother me when I'm focussing on work, and use 'clear' in each group when I've finished reading through it. Sometimes that means reading all the updates, others it's just a way of removing the old stuff I'm not going to bother with.

I only have two groups which basically split in to people I know well and want to read, and people who I don't know as well or are very noisy. The latter gets cleared a lot more without reading all the messages but lets me keep track of more local conversations and the interesting nuggets that come up occasionally.

The guy who makes Tweetdeck recently got some funding so he can work on it full time and hire in some extra talent, so it's likely to improve more rapidly than it has been.

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