Using Twitter as Information Filter
I admit it, I am not a power Twitter user. But I want to be, and here is why:
Twitter may be the single most effective digital information filtering tool available today.
What is an information filter? Anything that separates the things you want to read from the things you do not want to read. That is a good thing. With the abundance of digital information available to us, we must aggressively filter information to make it useful. Searching, tagging, sorting, and segmenting are all examples of filtering. Everyone must do this, but those of us who filter the best will get the most relevant information in the least amount of time. Time, being the most scarce resource, is very valuable, so Twitter usage may give you an advantage in a time-starved world.
Twitter helps you find the "golden nuggets" in less time
Why is Twitter the best digital information filter? Because people filter better than machines. The trick is to follow the right people. If you follow people who tweet a lot of new content that is of interest to you, you no longer have to go out and find that content yourself. It is like you have an army of information miners working for you to find the nuggets you are most likely to want to read. Internet searching and online recommendation services are great, but they can not beat (yet) an actual human brain for filtering information.
Recommended techniques for using Twitter to filter information. Here are six techniques that help get better results with Twitter:
