I'd like to be able to tag the people I follow, then filter timeline by tag

I think it's a great idea! I follow educators, friends and science bloggers.. would love to be able to tag now that I'm following over 500 people

Kindly refer to this related thread, where there's been extensive discussion on what a Groups feature would look like in Twitter.

Thanks for the link mdy, I enjoyed reading all of the conversation and I think the groups thing is a great idea. However, as I read it, that thread only casually touches on what I'm looking for. More to the point, except for one short comment at the end, it is kind of the opposite of what I'm advocating.

I'm not interested in limiting who see's my posts (although some of my follwers might be ;), I'm interested in limiting what posts I see from time to time, topically. For example, if I'm having a conversation with fellow bloggers, I might want to filter my view (via tag) at that time to just the bloggers I follow. If I want to see what my family and friends have said in the past couple of hours, I'd rather just filter by family and view those posts. etc.

I think many, if not most, users might not have the critical mass of people they follow to make this uber-valuable, but once you get to 300 or 400 it really becomes difficult to keep up with what is being said.

The tags would not be things the people I follow would designate or opt into, they would be tags I assign to them, enabling me to filter what I see in my time line from time to time.

I hope this makes sense :)

It also seems like it would be considerably easier to implement then a full groups module. I don't think it would be that difficult to write a wrapper over twitter to do it, I'd just prefer it was in the application itself :)

It makes you wonder whether Twitter will ever make a move to help people with more than 10 contacts. I wonder too if that they prefer to focus on those kinds of users, or if they simply haven't a clue how best to tackle this problem. It's certainly been discussed for more than a year (along with other suggestions) -- and while I appreciate that everything must be considered at scale now, the broken contact system really inhibits one's use of the service.

Yes, it makes perfect sense to me, since I'm one of those edge cases who follow over a thousand people. 8-)

And you're right -- most users won't even think of asking for this capability. According to a recent interview with the guys at Twitter, a solid 50% of Twitter users only follow around 10 people.

Anyway, I definitely can relate to this request. And it sounds like a great idea for a third-party application. If I encounter one that fits this requirement, I'll be sure to post a link to it here.

In the meantime, one work-around that I can suggest is to use the Summize Twitter Search.

It's a bit of a pain at the start since you have to explicitly enter the names of the people you want to see together in the same group, but once you've got the search parameters the way you like them, you can bookmark the URLs and visit them any time.

Also, Summize notifies you in real time if there are new search results that have come in which match your search parameters.

So, for example, if I wanted to see recent updates from @paisano, @pistachio, and @skalik as a group, I can enter this search string in Summize:

paisano OR pistachio OR skalik (you can click the link to see)

Unfortunately, that search parameter will also return @replies that other people have sent to them. Fortunately, we can use the minus operator to tell Summize to filter out tweets that are @replies to them by using this search string.

paisano OR pistachio OR skalik -@paisano -@pistachio -@skalik (click the link to see the difference)

You can use the advanced search page to enter people's names under "any of these words" and enter the @username versions of their names under "none of these words"

The method is crude, but it works, and is easy to use once you've got the URLs bookmarked. 8-)

Oh, I just learned how to make this even easier with Summize Twitter Search.

Just use the FROM operator with the OR operator.

For example: from:paisano OR from:skalik OR from:sorenj

That will filter out everything else that's not from the usernames you've specified.

Also, this exact same search capability is supported by the Flaptor Twitter Search. In their case, the operators are AUTHOR and OR.

For example: author:paisano OR author:skalik OR author:sorenj.

*sigh*