Filter this!
December 21, 2008 by Nikos Anagnostou
Cesar Rocchi of Posty wrote, on a guest post to Luis Gray’s blog, a simple “Guide to Unfollow Uninteresting Twitterers”
In general, I agree with what he says but here I want to elaborate a bit on his first rule, because, although quite natural, it is a bit unfair.
The rule goes like this:
What language is this?
When I stumbled upon a tweet with “strange” characters or words I opened that profile and then asked: does she regularly post in this language? If yes then unfollow. Moral: how can I be interested in what is expressed in a language that I don’t understand?
I wrote it is ‘quite natural’ because no one is interested in something he cannot possibly understand. It is a bit unfair though to the many people that write in two languages: their own and English.
My experience from Greek twitterers, for instance, is that they write 50% greek, 50% english. The Greek tweets would be pure noise to anyone not speaking the language. Likewise, it would be pure noise to me someone’s tweets in Mandarin Chinese, or even Italian.
But instead of unfollowing (or not following) all these people who might have something interesting to share when they write in English, I would rather employ a simple language filter.
Turning on the filter would wipe out all tweets that are in a language that I am not interested in, but leaving intact my twitter friends.
Such a filter would enable us all -as a matter of fact, it would encourage us- to follow people from every part of the world, and get through them a better, more balanced picture of what people of this planet think, care, wish, know or believe. A picture more evenly distributed, more diverse and therefore more interesting and more real.
The filter proposed is not a twitter specific feature. As a matter of fact, I
proposed something similar for Friendfeed sometime ago:
“How do you find the idea of friendfeed language filters? Many of the non English Speaking users, post in two languages: English and their language. It is obvious that if one does not speak a language, he does not want to follow a person that posts into it. A language filter would remedy this”
Such a filter could be used in facebook news stream too, and, in general, in any kind of info ‘streaming’ service.
And, of course, I wrote my proposal in English so not to be filtered out by those who should listen 
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