New York Times Bits blogger Nick Bolton wrote an article yesterday afternoon about Twitter’s need for more filters.  I couldn’t agree with this article more.  In fact, this issue is one of the reasons I have to turn Twitter off sometimes.  Often I’ll skim through my feeds and see posts from the same people every five minutes – people that I know don’t have someone else tweeting for them – and wonder how they get any actual work done.

Nick writes in his post:

“The frustration hit a boiling point for me a few weeks ago when many of my friends and colleagues traipsed off to Austin, Tex., to go to the interactive portion of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival.

I’ve never been to SXSW, and haven’t really had an urge to go; from what I hear, it’s a revelry of technology, parties and networking, all of which I can experience in New York.

But each year of the conference, when I start up Twitter, I am forced to attend SXSW through the people there who message about which conference session they are attending or how many people they were sharing a barbecued rib with. This year I also had to witness every single location-based check-in.”

For some Twitter users, this is fine.  Like with any other social networking site, people utilize Twitter for different things.  Some people may want to leverage it to engage with others at the same event or to get a play-by-play of what’s going on at an event they can’t attend personally.  The point here is that you have no way to make that decision on Twitter currently.

I’ve stopped using Facebook as much recently for this same reason.  I don’t want to know what Farmville animal an acquaintance from 7^th grade is or that a girl in my high school show choir has horrible morning sickness.

Before writing this post I did a quick Google search on Facebook filtering, just to make sure they hadn’t implemented some new filtering feature since I started spending less time there.  Turns out Facebook hasn’t technically designed a filter like this, but Nick Carlson of Business Insider tells us how he’s discovered eight simple steps to filter down updates just from the people you really want to keep up with.  This helps to cut out the unnecessary noise, without offending people and alerting them to the fact that you don’t want to know about their every move.

If this is something you struggle with as well, take a look at Nick’s article, How to Filter Out Facebook “Friends” Without them Knowing.

What are your thoughts?