Tweetdeck best solved this issue for me on my phone. The widget felt just right as it allowed me to divide my feed up into 4 or 5 useful columns and I was able to periodically check in at what seemed like the right rate. I really felt I was up-to-speed with stuff that interested me.

After Twitter finally killed the Tweetdeck mobile client earlier this year, I moved on to the official Twitter client. But now I've got something like the problem described in the article. I can't seem to get my Twitter feed where I want it and I'm gradually losing interest. @GreatDismal has become my de-facto curator for Twitter and I've gone back to just using bookmarks for sites like HN and Reddit to keep up with what's trending.

i wonder, too, if their whole control-freak attitude has alienated the people who were most invested in discussing and helping with this sort of meta-issue just out of a "twitter is the new commons" feeling.

i have no real idea whether it is or isn't essential to their business model to be able to control every aspect of how you view your stream, but personally i stopped caring about them the minute they did that. i still use twitter, but if they vanished overnight i wouldn't really feel any sense of loss, whereas when there was a thriving ecosystem of people building things atop the firehose i did feel like i was part of something that played a significant role in today's internet.

I was working on a Twitter client that did something very much like this (partitioning people into different streams, etc.), but once I saw the way the wind was blowing (in terms of how Twitter didn't want third-party developers), I now only run it on my machine for my own use.

Twitter flipped their decision on IFTTT. I wonder if they will reconsider their stance on twitter clients as well.

The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what many consider a good UE.

Having control of the UE is important.

However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better. There was warning though.

I can still write innovative apps for Apple's various OSes, but I cannot write an innovative Twitter client. They closed that door.

I think Twitter would have been better off just telling all the client writers that it was a requirement to show the "ad tweets" in the stream and call it a day. They are not Apple .

The problem was solved. By Summify. Then twitter bought them and that was the end of that.