One of the difficult concepts which folks new to Twitter run up against is this:

“You do NOT have to read EVERY tweet”

Like all simple statements this needs clarification. What I’m talking about here are the tweets of the people you are following; this is typically the default view you’ll dip into when you fire up your Twitter app of choice (for me thats TweetList..more on that later). This public timeline of your following (as opposed to replies and direct messages) is NOT an inbox where everything should be read, think of it as a roaring stream of data which you can dip in and out of as and when you choose.

How loudly your following stream “roars” by kinda depends on the number of people you are following. If you’re only following 100 folks then, depending on their volume, you can pretty much stay on top of all the tweets.

However, if you follow more than that (I currently follow 572) then this may not be an option; you need a better strategy for staying on top of things…

A Two Tier System

To address this problem I came up with a system and it works as follows:

1) I created a private Twitter list called “newspaper“. This is a list of folks who’s tweets I really don’t want to miss. If I’ve been off Twitter for a length of time (which is easy now that Instagram is grabbing all of my attention!) then I’ll read this list first.

2) I then use the magic of formlists.com to create another automagically populated list which I’ll call (say) “magazine“. Now I’m not giving step by step instructions in this post but, to summarise, using formlists means I can have an automatically created list comprising of people who i) I follow and ii) who are NOT on the newspaper list. Formulists then recreate this list each day (bless them!).

It’s then up to you to keep adding important people to your “newspaper” list.

The method of reading tweets (and this is why I mentioned TweetList earlier, as it rocks at Lists) is then:

- fire up your Twitter app and look at the “Newspaper” list first (rather than the main feed)

- Once/if you have exhausted the tweets on the newspaper list (and you’ve got time to read some more), shift across to the “magazine” list. The beauty here is that the magazine list will NOT show  tweets you’ve already read in the newspaper one.

Funky eh?

Joel

p.s. I’ve actually gone one step further here. Formlists have a magic, out of the box list called “people-i-interact-with” which, surprisingly, lists people who you speak to regularly. I have formulists set up to automatically include these people (who I’m following) into the “newspaper” list.