Social | Virtual Thoughts

I am a big fan of Twitter and am sure you love to tweet as well. Many a time I have been irritated with some unwanted info being floated around in twitter. It could be a #hashtag, a political drama, tweets about reality shows, justin bieber, britney spears, IPL, etc. But these are being tweeted by the people you follow and you generally like their tweets but it’s those times and events that you would have done away with?

What do you do? Unfollow temporarily ? This may not be an option due to many reasons like you may forget the handles, you really do not want to unfollow etc. If you are using Tweetdeck, there is an interesting option called Mute using which you can filter or block tweets. You could accomplish this using selected Keywords, hashtags, sources and twitter accounts as well. All these without unfollowing.

To enable this option:

Open Tweetdeck
Click on Settings
Click on Global Filter
Enter relevant fields
Click on Save Settings

I understand there are many other plugins and apps that will accomplish the same but rather than subscribe to multiple services, you could use one app for all of it. The only shortcoming that exists as of now is that the filters set on one platform are not replicating on the others, meaning if I have set up the filter on Laptop I am not seeing the same on Tweetdeck for android on my phone.

UPDATE [May 2014]:

Twitter too has finally launched mute option for its web, as well mobile version. Unlike the other apps like Tweetdeck, Falcon Pro where you can mute based on Keywords, sources or specific APIs, Twitter for web only lets you mute on the username. Here is how you do it on web or using the App for iOS/Android:

To mute a user from a Tweet, tap more and then mute @username. To mute someone from his/her profile page, tap the gear icon on the page and choose mute @username.

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While Newtwitter is getting rolled out in phases and might change various avatars when it is finally made available for all (meaning there is scope for improvement till we see the final version). Here are some improvements that Twitter can implement to make tweeting seamless and fun:

1. Retweet with comment / editing. Most of us are happy to add various pre-fixes to the tweets than just a plain RT. Anybody +1 ?

2. Auto-Shortening of URL the way Tweetdeck does it using Bit.ly TinyURL, and others (Oh! wait, I know bit.ly might be on the road to deletion by Libya’s DNR. Read more here) and others. Am not sure when the Twitter’s own shortening service T.co is going to be launched but definitely helps in lessening the time spent

3. Ability to upload pictures and videos natively (as in Tweetdeck using services like TwitPic, Yfrog,Posterous etc) instead of uploading them and then pasting the link.

4. Mute or Filter on keywords – There are many a times when an event or a person suddenly creates buzz on twitter and not many of them be to the liking of everyone. So what do you do? Unfollow because of continuous stream of tweets? What if we had an option to filter or mute based on keywords instead of Unfollowing tweeple. Tweetdeck provides this functionality and believe me it’s an awesome feature.

5. Ability to tweet on HTTPS connection instead of regular plain text. Although it may sound frivolous because what you tweet is going to be on the public domain, but DMs are supposed to be private. Echofon does provide https connection for tweets, but it is not complete.

Would Twitter really incorporate some of these or will it leave it to the API ecosystem in the form of third party vendors to improvise it? Quite amazing …

Any other features that you think will make #NewTwitter much more Fun? I will update interesting ones 😉