I have been exchanging a few tweets with @steevc (of Bag of Spoons) about how to deal with microblogging overload on services like Twitter and identi.ca.
He suggested something like PostRank but most tweets are so short and trivial that this seems like overkill. Short and trivial can still be interesting; the downside is that it can also be irritating when things are busy. My proposal, 100% vapourware (unless someone else has already built it), is what I have coined as Tweet Bubbling.
I would need a page showing all my contacts, allowing me to sort them into groups. The groups might have meaningful labels, such as “family”, “friends”, “locals”, “wafflers” or whatever. Each person would belong to one group, including the catch-all “everyone else”. The important information would be a number associated with each group. Small numbers would signify higher priority.
Now, instead of monitoring my raw twitter stream, I would be watching my “bubble stream”. From the pool of unread posts I would regularly receive next batch (frequency and batch size to be user definable). High priority items would float to the top of the list; lower priority ones would gradually appear at quiet times. The chance of an individual post making it to publication would depend on the priority and also how long it had been waiting. This could be refined with further filters to block tweets below a certain priority (stemming the flow when the recipient is busy), to delete them (clearing the decks) or to delete them if the waiting pool grows larger than a certain size (ideal for maintaining messages during a holiday period).
Now, before I even consider building such a thing, the first question is “has anybody else already built it”? Answers on a tweet to @basswulf.
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