I’ve been using Twitter for nearly three years now. I love this particular form of interaction, and it’s because of Twitter that I have my current job.

As great as Twitter is, there are some things about it that I don’t like. I like Twitter when it’s doing what it does best – sending and routing messages between millions of users. I don’t like Twitter when it’s showing me things I don’t want to see, and hiding things from me that I do.

To make Twitter better for me, I started writing a twitter proxy back in September. It acts as layer between twitter and all of my Twitter clients so that I can control, in one place, the flow of information between me and Twitter. I’ve been using it on my desktop and iPhone ever since (both Tweetie and Twitterrific support specifying a different “API URL”). I’m planning to make it ready for public consumption over Christmas.

Some of the things it supports/will support are:

• Ignore @user for [period]
• Ignore tweets from [@user1, @user2] containing [text]
• Ignore all tweets containing [text]
• Show all tweets from @user (including all of their @replies to people you do not follow)
• Ignore all tweets containing topics that are currently trending

I don’t know exactly how I’m going to release it, but it will probably be a combination of:

• Publicly available on GitHub (BSD license – you can run it yourself)
• A paid-for version running on a soon-to-be-built server (so you can use it without having to setup Apache, SSL certificates)

If all goes well this will happen just after the new year.

Update: This is still in development. I am using the current version, but have a number of constraints on my time and haven’t been able to get it to a point where I’m willing to release it to the public. Hopefully soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.