[jasonkester]

That screenshot sums up my experience with Twitter nicely: A dozen random thoughts, truncated to fit a certain size, thus requiring investment to decipher, which at the end reveals somebody talking about something that's only really interesting to themselves, and actually makes you feel slightly embarrassed for them.

My assumption was that other people were using some form of magic tool that filtered out relevent stuff and presented it in a coherent form. Since this looks like a screenshot from the author's own system, it seems that even power-users are seeing the same useless garbage that I do.

Why would you install something like this on your computer?

[nollidge]

On Twitter, you don't follow people who talk about things you're not interested in. It's that simple.

Now, obviously, nobody's 100% interesting all the time. So, yes, there is a "magic tool" to filter out uninteresting things: your brain. You see something that relies on context you're not privy to, you skip over it. It's that simple. You don't read Twitter, you scan it.

Everyone who criticizes Twitter seems to think that people use it to read boring things. No, I don't usually care what the people I'm following had for breakfast - except when Patton Oswalt describes his quick eats on a busy day [1]. Now, you might not find that funny. In which case, you stop following him, or you just furl your brow and keep skimming.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/pattonoswalt/status/23362445531684864

[jasonkester]

Was that link an attempt to point out something good on Twitter, or to point out one of the tweets that you have to filter out to get use from it? It took a while to parse, then turned out to be, well, let's say I want my 5 seconds back.

Actually, can anybody here point to a single good Twitter message so that I can see what one looks like?