Tweets fall into three broad categories that can be sorted according to whether they link elsewhere. The true and perfect tweets are self-contained units of information, a pithy saying or joke, some with the beauty of a haiku. At the other extreme are pointers to get you to read elsewhere. In between is a matter of degree. Thus:
- self-contained
- useful by itself, with link to explain more
- useless without expanding link.
When I don't have a WiFi connection, or am just looking for a quick diversion, I wish my tweet-stream could be filtered to allow only type 1). It shouldn't be hard to filter out all tweets containing links.
It would be nice to have the option to filter the type 2) tweets in and out, but that would be harder.
Another way to break tweets into three categories is
- general interest
- personal message
- advertisement.
There are authors and others whose tweets I follow, but I would rather filter out what they had for lunch or some reply to a message I didn't get from a friend of theirs. For now, when there is too little useful information in the mix, I just un-follow.