I was spending too long on Twitter with my consultancy account, trying to find posts of value that I could retweet and learn from.

I needed a Twitter client that was focused on value. I could not find one. So I wrote one.

ChatterScan Free Twitter Client

I recently released a new online Twitter client.

• ChatterScan.com

It is a very simple Twitter client:

• it only shows posts that have links in them
• it does not show re-tweets
• it does not show images or videos

Why?

I use Twitter as part of my social media marketing, but I also use it to learn.

On my consultancy Twitter account. I follow 640+ people and have 4500+ followers. I know that isn’t a lot compared to many people but it is a niche industry and I try to limit the number of people I follow otherwise I become overwhelmed with noise.

Recently, I have become overwhelmed with noise.

Chatter.

• a lot of personal posts
• retweets of posts I have already read
• it is hard to see the valuable posts which link to long form educational and useful content
• posts with irrelevant images

And this is made worse when I consume Twitter content on a mobile device.

• my ‘feed’ becomes one post at a time due to images and videos taking up huge amounts of space

Common Strategies

The most common strategy for dealing with this is partitioning people into lists to make it easier to read.

I do this. But…

• I have to keep moving people between lists
• I have to name lists effectively to avoid insulting someone
  • e.g. a list like ‘constantly talks about their pets’ might offend someone in it
• I forget to look at some lists
• I still spend too long reading Twitter

What adds value?

Social Media is an interesting place and posts typically:

• add value
• trigger engagement

Some posts do both.

What adds value to me?

This changes at different times. So I need to caveat. When I’m hunting for information to learn from or curate, what adds value?

• a post with a link to useful content

What detracts value when hunting to learn or curate?

• seeing the same posts (too many retweets)
• rants
• too many quips and off-topic posts
• posts with images but no ‘content’
• chatter

How to read twitter fast and avoid the Chatter?

I could not find a Twitter client that allowed me to effectively filter the people I follow.

Commun.it makes it very easy to find ’leads’ (new content from people I don’t follow), and engage with people. In fact it does everything except help with the daily feed reading of people I follow.

So I wrote an opinionated feed reader. After a few hours I had a proof of concept that could use Twitter OAuth, and read my feed. A few hours later I had an MVP:

• ChatterScan.com
• Authenticate with Twitter - so no security issues or account creation
• Uses Twitter API on your Home feed and Lists
• Only shows posts with links
• Does not render images

I called it ChatterScan because it allows me to “Scan Twitter without the Chatter”

Best Tool I Ever Wrote

ChatterScan.com has saved me so much time.

I can now scan my home feed very quickly, for:

• stuff to learn from
• stuff to curate

I still use my lists for engagement, but not for hunting down value.

It’s opinionated, therefore matches my style of reading.

Since its free, I recommend you try it.

It means I can actually follow more people. And, as we all know, following people is a great way to build the number of followers you have, so it should help me grow on Twitter, as well as process my followed feed faster.

Recommended - even if I did write it - ChatterScan.com