I've never met the author of the article, but I assume he's the type of person who is bothered when his Reader unread tally switches over to the plus mark.
I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their interests down to only those that I deem relevant? Am I so bad at skimming content or choosing which content is worthy of in-depth inspection that I must have a computer do the editing for me?
Obviously, the answers to those questions are highly subjective and use-dependent. Personally, the only editing I need is the unfollow button. If I respect a person enough to want to hear what he has to say, I gladly take the risk that sometimes his output won't be immediately relevant. (As an aside, a year ago I met one of my favorite journalists. I asked how his dog was, since he had been tweeting about his new puppy. It was a nice ice breaker. I didn't follow him for dog-training updates.)
I should make a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy Twitter user. The ratio of feeds:twitters followed for me is something like 10:1.
I respect your sympathy for and willingness to read what those you follow deem interesting. But I think the author of the blog post is speaking of a problem that emerges at a larger scale when you follow more & more people. Your stream becomes bigger while the amount of time you have stays the same so your options are 1) unfollow people, 2) don't read everything, or 3) put in more time. Personally, I don't like 1 or 2 because I feel like I'll miss out on timely, relevant information and 3 isn't an option for most of us. Thus, the need for a solution like the one the blog post describes. Shameless plug: here's how I'm trying to fix the problem - http://slipstre.am/
I agree with all of that, except I've found 2 to be the most useful, especially with regards to how I manage Reader. My time spent in feeds has been a lot less hurried since I learned to stop worrying and love the Mark as Read button.
I just feel like I personally get information in so many different ways, that if something is big enough, I'll see it in many places and am pretty much bound to read one of them. I can count on seeing any big tech story here on five different feeds, Google News (go to time-killer on my phone in the rare occasion my feeds are empty), several twitter accounts, and probably here on HN (more like 15 feeds if it has Apple in the title.)
I went to your site but you lost me with the lack of content--maybe at this stage that's important to weed out the laziest of the "testers." Have you thought of doing just a quick before/after screenshot to show default twitter vs. your application, or is it too early for that?
Edited to add: er, my fault. My brain skips over flash almost automatically. I didn't watch your video.
If you are looking for harbingers and early insights they typically have a weak signal, so you have to sift through quite a lot of content / message traffic to find them.
Your use case is fine, it's just not the author's.
I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their interests down to only those that I deem relevant? Am I so bad at skimming content or choosing which content is worthy of in-depth inspection that I must have a computer do the editing for me?
Obviously, the answers to those questions are highly subjective and use-dependent. Personally, the only editing I need is the unfollow button. If I respect a person enough to want to hear what he has to say, I gladly take the risk that sometimes his output won't be immediately relevant. (As an aside, a year ago I met one of my favorite journalists. I asked how his dog was, since he had been tweeting about his new puppy. It was a nice ice breaker. I didn't follow him for dog-training updates.)
I should make a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy Twitter user. The ratio of feeds:twitters followed for me is something like 10:1.