I’ve been using a technique for a while now to reduce twitter noise, and I suppose it deserves documenting. I like to keep my tweet volume low (specifically your regular broadcast tweets, rather than replies.

When attending a conference…

I’ll oftentimes write a tweet as a reply to the conference’s twitter account. For example, I’m off to JSConf right now. So I might do

@JSConf just landed. here in PDX. anyone wanna share a cab? also beerz. nao.

Similarly when using twitter as the backchannel, I don’t search just the #jsconf hashtag, but purely ‘jsconf’ so I get both the hashtags and the replies.

When targetting a smaller portion of your followers…

Sometimes I wanna tweet some info that’s interesting to only some folks, like strictly people interested in javascript language details or straight up designers. I’ll pick a pretty popular person in that area and shoot it of almost like a reply to them:

@kangax et al, Annotated ECMAScript 5.1 now @ http://es5.github.com incl. links to MDC and @DmitrySoshnikov’s research

Wha?

This all makes sense because of how twitter handles replies. If I reply to @homeboy1 and you don’t follow him, you don’t see that one in your timeline. If you do, you do.

So there it is.. mostly I see it as a polite thing to do when at a conference and the rest of your followers want to put you on mute for 3 days. :)