Blogging Tips

Filttr is yet another Twitter timeline cleaning tool that will filter out the junk and only display what interests you. If you are following a large amount of people, this can really save you a lot of time and unneeded frustration. Though Filttr has been around for about a year, it is definitely more useful now than when it first came out – since Twitter spam continues to skyrocket at unbelievable speeds. Let’s take a look at how Filttr can really help us “make sense of Twitter”.

Customizable Behavior

This section lets you customize a few important interface features. This allows for flexibility, instead of forcing default settings on you. For interaction you can enable or disable opening links in new windows, keyboard shortcuts and showing profile badges. For the sidebar you can choose whether or not to show the profile box, who the info box or display reply notifications on the timeline. You can then customize how things appear on the web version vs the mobile version – like hiding blacklisted tweets and revealing information about URLs when mousing over them.

Aliases

Here you can add users and/or search terms to be displayed in your timeline –  the rest will be hidden. You can either type in the person’s name or select them from the long list that is displayed on the left side. Be warned, 100 followers are displayed at first and 100 more are automatically loaded each time you scroll down. So, if you are following hundreds or thousands of followers, this will take a long time and might even freeze up your browser. It’s probably best to use the search box to search for friends. Under the advanced options, you can really specify what you’d like displayed in your timeline. You can choose certain words, choose to not display any links or display only links and even choose a specific location or radius.

Keyphrases

This section lets you creates a blacklist and whitelist to suite your preferences. These, of course, do exactly as expected; blacklisted phrases will never appear in your timeline, while whitelisted phrases will always show no matter what. So this is yet another way to create specific filters to remove junk from your timeline. To make it even better, they even allow you to blacklist specific sources. So for example, if there are users who have automatic tweets coming in from Twitterfeed, you can blacklist Twitterfeed so that those tweet will never be seen again.

Priorities

This feature is nice because you can choose how many tweets you’d like to see and from who. So, you choose to show less from some people, more from others and block others. This is all done by a simple slider that can be moved up or down. If you block someone, it will actually unfollow them. So, be sure that you really don’t want to see anything from the person, because they will be able to tell that you are no longer following them. Priorities can be set for all users or just some; the choice is up to you.

Facebook Status Updating

As an added bonus, Filttr allows you to update your Facebook status right from the site using their application. You can choose to let it update your profile or fan pages (if you admin any). Once you do, you can choose for it to send all your tweets (minus @replies and DMs) to Facebook or only the tweets with #fb in them. You can also choose to strip any hashtags from your updates that are posted to Facebook.

Timeline

Once you’re done customizing your timeline, all that’s left is to sit back and enjoy reading your tweets. The timeline auto-refreshes on its on but you can pause it at any time. You’ll also be able to see which tweets have been filtered because you’ll see something like the screenshot below in its place. Replies are also show inline, so it’s easy to keep up with conversations.

Personally, I wish I would have known about Filttr sooner. It’s definitely something that comes in handy for cleaning up your Twitter timeline and making it enjoyable again. What do you think?