I had both CNN and Twitter on yesterday all afternoon, looking for news about the Boston Marathon bombings. I have not done a rigorous analysis (nor will I, nor have I ever), but it felt to me that Twitter put forward more and more varied claims about the situation, and reacted faster to misstatements. CNN plodded along, but didn’t feel more reliable overall. This seems predictable given the unfiltered (or post-filtered) nature of Twitter.

But Twitter also ran into some scaling problems for me yesterday. I follow about 500 people on Twitter, which gives my stream a pace and variety that I find helpful on a normal day. But yesterday afternoon, the stream roared by, and approached filter failure. A couple of changes would help:

First, let us sort by most retweeted. When I’m in my “home stream,” let me choose a frequency of tweets so that the scrolling doesn’t become unwatchable; use the frequency to determine the threshold for the number of retweets required. (Alternatively: simply highlight highly re-tweeted tweets.)

Second, let us mute based on hashtag or by user. Some Twitter cascades I just don’t care about. For example, I don’t want to hear play-by-plays of the World Series, and I know that many of the people who follow me get seriously annoyed when I suddenly am tweeting twice a minute during a presidential debate. So let us temporarily suppress tweet streams we don’t care about.

It is a lesson of the Web that as services scale up, they need to provide more and more ways of filtering. Twitter had “follow” as an initial filter, and users then came up with hashtags as a second filter. It’s time for a new round as Twitter becomes an essential part of our news ecosystem.

Categories: everythingIsMiscellaneous, journalism dw