Twitter hits 11

"Engineering. Engines at Warp Factor 9!"

"Och, ah cannae gie her any more Cap'n, she's gonna blow!"

And yet every time the good old Enterprise not only didn't blow as hard as the plot, but actually pulled the rabbit out of the hat and managed to find the mythical 11 setting.

Well, Twitter has just painted another number on the dial, with the volume of tweets officially hitting a level at which I can no longer catch up on what happened in the last eight hours. Of the just under 260 people I keep an eye on, I can say that there's 20% who form the core of those messages, say about 50 or so. At this point, is where Twitter should be looking at letting me put my friends in groups so that I can start watching relevant feeds.

For example, I have a dozen folks who are in Perth type of local, and a further dozen that are Australia local. Then there are exceptional friends around the world whose messages I wouldn't like to miss for the world. I can think of an easy two dozen of those. And there are news/blog release sites, which just announce the latest articles of interest, and again, I don't want to miss those but when around 80 - 150 articles hit my one bulging RSS feed in a day, I'd rather view them as a separate group please.

I was talking in a previous recent article about the future of social messaging, communications - with especial regard to IP telephony and voice messaging - imagine a scenario where you wanted to follow a conversation between your friends, and there were five irrelevant messages between each friend message - pure babel. So grouping/prioritising (such as Particls already does) for your pareticular things that you pay attention to, will be a must. If Twitter doesn't soon build some attention filtering in, in the form of groups or a similar mechanism, they stand to be abandoned because of the sheer impossibility of following a conversation.

A new thing that Twitter now has to try and accommodate. More Bluebirds of Crappiness in ur serverz. But it's the next step and it will have to be taken.