Thanks to Becky McCray, I’ve learned all about filters and the ability to mute twitter application sources.  I’m now experiencing “social media twitter” without the noise of automation.  Only tweets from people that are online – how it use to be. (see here why I’m writing this)

I’ll start from the beginning.

When I first entered Twitter I read EVERYTHING that EVERYONE wrote.  This meant when I woke up, I’d be scrolling through a  few hundred and sometimes a few thousand tweets to “catch up”.  For me, it was a 24 hour conversation tool.  But after I followed a few hundred people – this became almost impossible.  That’s when a fellow Twitter friend told me to envision Twitter like a river of conversation -“you can’t possibly see it all, and if you try you’ll burn yourself out.  Just worry about talking and reading when you’re logged in.  Imagine that like showing up to the party.  If you need to get caught up on a conversation, someone will catch you up.”  This worked great! I could log in early in the morning, and have my virtual cup of coffee with my friends and have great conversations.  Later in the day and in the evening I could do the same.  As time went on, I met more and more people.

As of writing this post, I follow just over 4,750 people.  A majority of the people I follow I would categories as “social media enthusiasts”.  These are people who use the major social platforms for their jobs, for their clients, and for their personal art (as bloggers, speakers, authors, etc).  These are my friends.  These are people I’ve followed because at some point, we’ve had conversations, I’ve felt they were like-minded, and in some cases, we became “offline” friends.  That’s too many people to talk to all at once, but luckily they are stretched across timezones  and different work schedules, so it’s not so loud all the time.  Except for the automated noise.  I hate the automated noise.  It’s just not for me.

You see, I understand why people use third party tools to push content into the Twitter stream.  I get it.  I get your intentions.  But I don’t like it, and it just adds to the noise that already is overwhelming to me on a daily basis.  I don’t want to unfollow you.  I like you when you’re being you and just “tweeting as yourself”.  I don’t want to add you to a list because your “marketing messages” will just cloud that view too.  What I really want is a twitter where the tweets are categorized between “live”, “pictures of my food”, “4 square checkins you don’t care about”, etc.  I think I’ve seen developers talk about that over on app.net.

So let’s get on to the muting part.  Here’s what I’ve done with the help of Becky McCray.

• Downloaded Tweetbot. (Don’t worry PC and android folks, you can do this with tweetdeck filters, but my experience has been with my IPAD which is my major “tool” for tweeting)
• Watched my timeline and did a “swipe left” on the first tweet that annoyed me because it wasn’t what I wanted to see.
• Held down on the “source” text for that tweet (such as MapMyRun for Android, The Huffington Post, Triberr, etc)
• Chose “MUTE”.
• Go back to timeline
• Repeat

I’m not muting people, I’m just muting Twitter sources.  I’ve decided against muting Tweetdeck and Hootsuite simply because too much of my stream of real conversations would be wiped out.  I might have made some mistakes and muted “too much”.  It might never be perfect, but I’m really enjoying it.  I’ve gone to getting a few thousand tweets every hour to less than a hundred.  I made that number up – but you get the point.  Oh, and I still get PLENTY of news from my twitter stream.  Anything that’s awesome eventually gets retweeted or commented on by a human.

My full list of muted sources of today: (any tweet that has #quote, Any tweets from the following third parties: Alternion, AWeber Email Marketing, Azumio, bitly, Buffer, Bullhorn Reach, Cortex, dlvr.it, Facebook, FeedBlitz, Flipboard, foursquare, Friends+Me, GetGlue.com, Google, GrabInbox, Gremln, hopflow, IFTTT, Instagram, JustCoz, JustUnfollow, LinkedIn, LockerGnome, MailChimp, MapMyRun for Android, MarketMeSuite, NetworkedBlogs, Pandora, Paper.li, Pinterest, Plancast, Project Tweet, Pulse News, ReqCloud, Runmeter, SharedBy, ShareThis.com, Simplify360, smqueue, Social Proxy by Mailchimp, SocialFlow, SocialOomph, Spread The Next Web, Sprout Social, Stream Publisher, TeamWahooly, The Huffington Post, Triberr, Tumblr, Tweet Button, Tweet Old Post, tweet4me tools, Twittascope, twitterfeed, Visibli, Weeder, WordPress.com, WPTweetily, Yelp, Zite Personalized Magazine)

So, what do you think?  Angry?  Intrigued?  Give it a whirl and let me know what YOU’VE muted or filtered!

UPDATE: Read the 8pm warrior’s take on this here.