Clean up Your Twitter Feed with TidyTweet

Everyone seems to be joining Twitter now and with the increase in users, we also see an increase in spam, inappropriate posts/tmi (too much info) and just things you don’t want to read about. Sometimes I find that it’s more of a chore and pain to read through my Twitter feed to weed out the good stuff but, this is where a site like TidyTweet comes into play. TidyTweet filters out the clutter that you don’t want to read in your Twitter feed by letting you personally customize what you’d like to see in that feed.

You will first need to signup for an account, which only takes a few seconds. Upon doing so, you’ll also be able to create your own customized, private web address to be used for your TidyTweet feed. From there it is pretty self explanatory. You’ll be able to add 1 or 2 feeds for personal use. There are quite a few filter and setting that you’ll need to customize before you get your feed.

Define Your Feed

This section is required. Here you’ll need to first add a “Descriptive Title”; this is just for your own personal use so that you can differentiate between your feeds if you add another (or more for businesses). Next you’ll need to add keywords for monitoring. When doing so, there are various search operators that you can use as well.

Choose Your Filters

Everything in this section is optional. You can choose to filter out specific languages and even inappropriate language (words included in their pre-defined list). So if you only wanted to see tweets in English, you can select English and everything else would be filtered out. A tweet is not very helpful if you cannot understand it, right? For the inappropriate language filter, you can also add in your own words to filter out. Next you can filter specific users. You can choose users that will be auto-approved and/or users that will be auto-rejected. This is great if always want to see what certain users are tweeting or always want to ignore others.

Finally, you can fine tune your feeds by selected “spam and clutter filters”. You can choose to reject newly created accounts that have been created within a certain amount of time; the amount of time can also be customized. Also you can choose to reject tweets that include multiple trending topics; this is often a technique that many spammers use as well. Here you can customize the number of trending topics in a tweet to filter out. You can also choose to reject all @ replies and retweets.

Monitor Your Feed

This is where you choose how the final product is displayed to you. There are 3 options: automatically approve all tweets that make it through your filters; manually approve all tweets that make it through your filters; automatically approve all tweets that make it through your filters after the following delay (customizable). If you have a pretty large feed, it’s probably smart just to automatically approve it unless you will have the time to go through all of them to manually approve.

Viewing Your Feed

Now that you’ve finished setting up your feed, there’s a few ways that you can view it. You can watch them auto-update using your customized URL that you created when signing up; this is called your public feed. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to in a number of different ways. This may be useful if you use a feed reader quite often. You can embed the widget on your blog or website. If you want to use it on a WordPress blog, there’s a plugin for that. You can “see a visualization of your feed suitable for public displays at conferences, kiosks, etc” via VisibleTweets; this is really unique, customizable and can even be seen in full screen mode. If you’ve chosen to manually approve tweets, you can do this via the “moderate feed” button from the feed dashboard. This is also where you can edit or disable your feed along with viewing and sharing it.

Though TidyTweet is free for personal use, if you’re a business it will cost you $10 per month per feed. A personal account only allows you to add 1 user to manage and moderate your feed(s). You can only add up to 2 feeds on a personal account and the “Powered by TidyTweet” logo will always be displayed at the bottom of your embedded feed. On the other hand, a business account gives you more freedom by letting you add unlimited users and removing the logo. There is, however, a 14-day free trial for the business plan.

TidyTweet is definitely a great way to customize and tweak your Twitter feed in order to see exactly what’s important to you. Along with that, it’s also a great way to share those tweets with others. If you’re looking for a way to monitor specific keywords, reduce the amount of spam you see along with make reading your Twitter feed quick and painless, then Tidytweet is definitely for you.

Written by Charnita Fance from mrsfance
Posted on February 5th, 2010 and filed under Social Media
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