Here's my problem: I have a lot of friends on Twitter and many of them can be mostly noise, not much signal.

I can't unfollow them because they are my friends and I may as well just send them a tweet that says "you're a jerk and I don't want to talk to you anymore."

I would like Tweetie to help me: Please give me an option to squelch a user's tweets. Some days I don't want to read what they have to say, some days I do. Make it easy to toggle. But ALWAYS show me any of their tweets if they refer to @myname.

This would allow me to continue "following" them (keeping up appearances..) but suppress what they have to say unless they talk to me directly. Or I feel like reading it.

I feel that Twitter should implement this as part of their API, but since that's never going to happen, the consuming apps should pick up the legwork here.

Thanks!