How To: Filter The Noise On Twitter
Okay, I get it…the Swine Flu is big news right now and it’s dangerous and I need to wash my hands and not lick toilet bowls in Tijuana and all that. I think I’m taking plenty of precautions. However, my Twitter stream is lighting up all day long with stuff about the Swine Flue and I don’t want to hear about it anymore, so what to do? This very simple trick will show you how to filter out all mentions of Swine Flu, or anything else for that matter. And yes, I do think that it is ironic that I wrote this post on the same day that I have mentioned the Swine Flu at least three times. And yes, Chumdinger is a friend of mine, and I loved his link in this screenshot :). Keep in mind that this tutorial is specifically filtering out one key word, but you can use it for anything, to remove or to search.
- Use Tweetdeck. If you are not familiar with this Adobe Air application for managing your Twitter stream, then read my quick tutorial here (although it’s slightly out of date as new versions have been released since the writing), then download it here, sign in and continue on.
Apply your filter. Look down at the bottom of any column that you have created (it won’t work for the Facebook column if you have added that integration) and click on the icon that looks like a little arrow going into something. Whatever column is on the far left (usually your “All Friends” feed) will have this icon 1st on the left, all other columns will have it 2nd on the left. Click the “Filter This Column” icon and you will be presented with a few choices. First, make sure that your filter type is set to “Text”. Next, type in the word that you want to remove…in this case I am putting in “swine”. Finally, click the middle idea and make sure you have a minus sign and not a plus sign. That’s it! All tweets that use the word “swine” will magically disappear from your stream.- Optional reverse play. Maybe you want to see only the tweets that are talking about the Swine Flu. This is simple enough to do, change the minus sign to a plus sign, and only references to “swine” will be included. Nifty, huh?
Pretty simple, isn’t it? Now that you know how to filter basic keywords, play around with it a little more. You can filter with other criteria than text words, try “sources”, “+”, “Tweetdeck” to see only those that are posting info via Tweetdeck, or “Name”, “-”, “Joe” to remove everybody that has the word Joe anywhere in their user name. How cool is that?
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When I have a full column I display only the tweets I want to get rid of by using the filter.
Then I select “Mark all as read” and then “Delete All Read”
This will clear out a good chunk of meme infections very quickly.
neat tricks, but I can’t seem to filter out multiple things – I don’t want to hear about swine, #ff or #followfriday…
Have tried Bob Brown’s tip – works nicely, but not for future tweets that arrive…
My opinion is that filtering is potentially dangerous to the filterer… so much so that I am off to blog about it :-)
Its worth checking out twalala.com which allows muting of tweeters and tweets.
that was helpful, matt. thanks. dave
Nice tip, I’d been wondering if there was a client that could filter out unwanted tweets, this looks like it’ll do the trick.
I’m with Linnet on this one.
I think the real problem is how we are using Twitter. ReTweeting is a flawed system that creates a lot of the noise you speak of.
Realistically you shouldn’t have to filter out anything if you are following Tweeps that post good content. We should be focusing on filtering who we follow rather than the tweets themselves.
Great point Jon, I think filtering who we follow is important too! I wrote that up as well…just my $.02 on it. http://mattsingley.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/5-ways-to-follow-good-people-on-twitter/ Thanks for the comment!
I’ve been using Tweetdeck for two months and I don’t think I even noticed those options until now. Crazy!
Thanks,
Donagh