[mcdougle]

How did you go about curating your feed?

I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it.

Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow their Twitter too).

It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that I actually have to type the URL into my address bar because I can't get there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the default, then one big link away from the initial page.

[walterbell]

Lists are the way to go.

Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

[jonathansizz]

Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on the user's part.

[austenallred]

I use TweetDeck. It's like the power user version of Twitter. I generally have 20+ columns on my screen at any given time.

Most of the people I follow I found through people I know retweeting them or through looking at the feeds of other successful/important people (for example, I recreated the feeds of other investors/entrepreneurs) - http://theireyes.austenallred.com/

[mcdougle]

TweetDeck seems to be exactly what I was looking for!

And that other site (twitter through their eyes) looks awesome. Thanks!

[pjc50]

Twitter is like any other social network in that it works better if the people you know personally are using it. The only way to build up a good feed is to explore out through your friends' retweets to find accounts they follow that you also like. Then periodically look at your feed volume as a whole and delete anyone too high-traffic or recently uninteresting.