Basically, there are some people I follow because they talk about a topic I am interested in, however, I'm usually not to interested in their personal lives. Likewise, there are many people I follow where I am interested in their personal lives. And I am never interested in tweets about what people had for lunch or their haircut. Ideally, people would just self-enforce, but it's really hard to do.

Because people are rarely consistent, or could have very interesting stuff between bouts of 40 blow-by-blow cricket updates, just following or not isn't granular enough to make sure the signal stays high. I tried creating a signal group, but it was still too noisy, and I missed some of the interesting stuff from some people.

This is where twilter came from. At the simplest level, twilter would filter tweets and only show you tweets about things you have explicitly asked for or explicitly not asked for. For example, anything with the words "haircut" in I would not like to see, ever. These filters could be grouped into blocks of concepts. For example, there could be a "soccer" filter which would look for words or phrases like: "soccer", "football", "Manchester United", "Bafana Bafana" etc. This filter could even be a sub-filter of a greater "sport" filter. Creating these filters would require a bit of work. For example, I've recently been working on determining sentiment from tweets, and words like "interesting" are over-used and can be misleading, whereas words like "awesome" almost certainly imply a positive attitude. At a later stage, or if the right people get involved up front, natural language processing could be used to do this better. There could even be a crowd-sourcing options with 'community' filters or an option to share your filters with others so easy the development burden.

These filter groups could then be applied as a blacklist or whitelist to your whole twitter feed, or more interestingly, individual people. Thus, if I use the examples above, if I follow someone because I'm interested in what they have to say about security only, I would apply an "information security" filter in whitelist mode (i.e. only show me those tweets); whereas if I follow someone I'm more generally interested in but who talks about sport and their haircut quite often, I could apply the "sport" and "minutiae" filters in "blacklist" mode (i.e. show me everything except those).

This brings me to the second part of twilter, the feedback mechanism. I can complain about how uninteresting someone's haircut tweets are, but they'll just look at their follower count and keep doing what they're doing. As twitter is a fairly self-involved activity (follower counts, quitter and all those other services), I would want a feedback mechanism where someone could look up their twitter user on twilter and see what tweets were being filtered and why. Hopefully, this would provide an incentive for people to keep themselves interesting. It will of course allow people to tune things to beat the filters, but if they're that desperate to talk about something many people are filtering, you can just unfollow them ;)

That's the idea. Now who's going to build it?