Most of us are into sharing information with ours peers through social networks. The other way around, subscribing to “news” posted by other people is likely to be even more common.

This is where often the problem starts. The amount of incoming messages quickly surpasses the limit of what a single person can process during a day. At least without having to make hanging out in social networks one’s main occupation. If you’d like to be on top of all the messages you need to assign more time to for catching up or – as I prefer – let go of some people and remove them from your stream.

Let’s talk about Twitter specifically.

The daily amount of Tweets can skyrocket pretty quickly due to various reasons. In the short term due to things like sportsing (or other) events, in the long term by following people with a high tweet load or simply by following too many people.

Time to clean up.

Since events or specific discussions often have keywords, or even better hashtags, associated to their tweets those are easily muted within all modern Twitter clients. The client of my choice, Tweetbot, gives the option to mute hashtags or even whole users for a specific amount of time. So if you are annoyed by a sportsing discussion you know is happening only at the very day, just mute it for the next 24 hours or so.

For users with generally high output it might not be as easy as often it is not so clear to see which of the followed people are responsible for the high tweet count. For this, a little tool was created by Allen Pike of Steamclock Software: Unladen Follow.

An example of my top 10 followees in terms of tweet load.

Unladen Follow analyses the twitter profiles of the people you follow for you by a number of input parameters and gives you an estimation of what the tweet load is. It is quite helpful to find those spammers in your timeline as well as to evaluate whether to really start following somebody you have just encountered on Twitter.

An example of the detailed evaluation of a Twitter user.