Why We Need Yet Another Twitter Tag

Poor moms.

Just when we tell them to get on Twitter, we make them learn our strange character codes that mean things on the service. DMs, RTs, @replies, #hashtags, ^codes… it’s not exactly the easiest learning curve.

That said, I think we need another tag.

Here’s an example. I follow Klout‘s Twitter account because I’m keen to learn when they have some news — an enhancement to their service, an announcement of downtime, that kind of thing. But Klout’s Twitter posts are almost all either @replies to people or automated robot posts. There’s got to be a way to filter those out… some kind of universal tag, like how the ^ tag became a way of indicating which person authored a tweet on a multi-author account.

And that tag should be [drum roll] the ~ symbol.

When used at the beginning of a tweet, ~ would indicate that that particular tweet was devoid of personal @messages and was a corporate announcement.

Okay, not really.

Clearly, there must be an alternative to this tongue-in-cheek proposal. Some companies have established different Twitter accounts — one for news, one for chatty things — but somehow that’s not the answer either.

Because filtering isn’t doing the job quote yet. So far, only Tweetdeck (to my knowledge) lets you filter out characters across a stream. For instance, you can (and I did) filter out RT from streams because I didn’t want to see any retweets. But that was for an entire stream, and not account-specific. And Tweetdeck forgets your filter as soon as you shut the program down. Hootsuite, the Twitter manager I use now, doesn’t even have that function (as far as I’ve been able to tell).

Is there a better solution? Am I missing something?