Twitter is now curating a list of articles that are popular among the people you follow. A bit like what Nuzzle has been offering for years. Twitter calls this section “Popular articles”. Sounds like it would be great, right?
“Popular articles” will unveil what your Twitter network considers to be good. However, you might not consider those articles very good. Thus, you might find yourself disappointed with your Twitter network.
This is going to sound harsh, but when I tried Nuzzel a year or two ago, it unveiled to me that I follow a bunch of people whose tweets I’m not really interested in. Since Nuzzle looks at all the people I’m following and pulls the most popular links, but the stories that seemed so mainstream and overdone.
But that’s my own fault. I follow too many people whose tweets I never read. Nuzzel (and now Twitter Popular Articles) uncovers those unread tweets, and I’m like, “blah!” (I’m sorry to my Twitter following).
Another secret, I intentionally don’t read my entire Twitter following. Occasionally I’ll check my Twitter home stream. But the primary way I read Twitter is through lists. Even though I follow 1,000 people, there are only about 200 in lists whose tweets I really read every day. I love the people in my list of 200. They tweet about things that I find interesting and entertaining.
Those other 800 people… Well, maybe I need to do some editing of who I follow.
[hat-tip to Chris Thilk. His blog post, Twitter Finally Gets Into Curation, inspired this one]
Yesterday I started to use the home stream in Twitter. I’ll blog my thoughts about it sometime soon (maybe)