Assumptions:
1. You follow around 100 people.
2. 50% of them tweet 5 times a day.
3. 20% of them tweet once.
4. 10% of them tweet once in a week.
5. 10% of them tweet 10 times a day.
This is a rough estimate for the people I follow.
If you calculate there is a total of 250 + 20 + 100 = 370 tweets per day.
Ignoring 50% of tweets as junk.
You have aproxly 200 tweets.
How I use twitter?
I like going to twitter.com and reading all the tweets.
But skimming 200 tweets is again a pain, so much of trouble. Besides few of the tweets might call for action. There would be some links that you would want to read later, there would be some friends who would be going out for coffee, and you might want to join them, etc. etc.
One idea would be to unfollow people, few of them might get offended and then your relations might ruin or something like that.
Another would be to create a fake profile and then follow only the ones you want to and are interested in.
Third would be to have some desktop plugin that would notify with the tweets, but that would be a distraction if you are working and are in the middle of something.
Fourth way is via lists, I do not like going to twitter.com/<my_user_name>/lists/xyz // the url does not look good.
So here is the question:
1. How do people on HN manage their timeline? (Like there are things like Zero Inbox http://inboxzero.com/ rule for managing email)
Is there something for tweets as well, or collectively can we brainstorm over here and come up with something?
2. What other functionalities do you wish tweeter had, like categorizing a tweet in your timeline, saving it for further action etc. etc.