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.

1. 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this Adobe Air application for managing your Twitter stream, then read my quick tutorial here (although it’s slightly out of date as new versions have been released since the writing), then download it here, sign in and continue on.
2. 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.
3. 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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