I agree with, Jason. Anything outside of the main timeline seems silly.

Twitter trend accounts, like @NiemanLabFuego, make me realize how much good stuff I'm missing. I'm interested in 80% of what's tweeted from that account and see less than 50% in my own timeline.

Related: buzzfeed.com

Here's a branch from earlier today that this is slightly forking from:
branch.com

I'd argue that Twitter already provides the "best tweets people you follow read," thanks to Favoriting (Discover tab) and Retweeting (main timeline). I'm not sure that I believe Twitter can programmatically tell people what I think is "best" from my timeline.

As for Josh's desire for surfacing trends, it seems like we're talking about following topics rather than people. This may actually be a good way to a) onboard new users (don't worry about following individuals, Twitter curates lists of people that fit into trends, categories, etc.) and b) isolate real life events. For instance, it would've been great to follow the Hurricane Sandy topic (and have Twitter programmatically provide a feed of Sandy-related tweets that trend upward).

Then after the event wound down, I could unsubscribe. This is probably applicable to longer-term interests, but the short-term events are where Twitter shines brightest and, honestly, hashtags aren't cutting it, in my opinion.

I really want "Top 10 Tweets of the day for <topic>" or "trending tweets for <topic>" as discrete modules i can personalize my discovery tab with. For example, i kinda like sports but i don't love any particular team/player. I would however enjoy seeing the best tweets every day by athletes. I find it difficult to identify curation accounts which do this w predictable quality/volume.

I don't want this stuff in my main feed bec i like cycling through from high signal to low (my main feed --> discovery tab)

+1, Hunter. That actually makes me think about Circa.

+1 to "Top 10 Tweets" for a topic! Or top ten links would be even better!

Cap, do you really like seeing what people Favorite? As it's used more and more like a "Like" button I find it super noisy, and insider-baseball-y.

I do think some sort of topic solution would help with on-boarding. Friends from college ask me all the time, "I'm interested in startups now and wanna keep up. Who should I follow?"

Josh: I enjoy it when I see it. Maybe if Favorites were surfaced more publicly somehow in the main timeline, user behavior around them would change (people I follow generally don't RT willy-nilly or without purpose).

Ahhhh, that's a really interesting idea! If I knew many folks were gonna see my Favorites I would definitely use it differently.

(Though the line between it and Retweet would start to get blurry.)

Blurry, yes. But maybe there shouldn't be two functions. :) Or maybe a Favorited item only gets shown in the timeline if it's trending upward.

Here are a few random thoughts in no particular order:

* Twitter probably should NOT implement anything akin to Facebook's Edgerank. There is magic in seeing everything by the people you follow... it means you treat your follow graph more carefully rather than as a junk drawer for everything.
* Twitter already has a notion of "super follow" that isn't really called out, ie people that you follow and have push notifications turned on.
* I've long wanted a version of my home timeline that only included tweets that had been fave'd or RT'd by someone. An easy way skim when you follow more than 500 people (I follow 1,500)
* A "fuzzy follow" of an entire timeline is yet a 4th way to follow someone who acts more as curator than creator.

There's way too much noise in what "Fav" means to start pushing them towards main timeline. The only think i could see there would be inserting and highlighting tweets that have been fav'ed by multiple people you follow (or people you follow and multiple other tweeters - some critical mass signal). eg

Fav'ed by @joshm and 47 other people
"@ev: Branch is great"

Hunter: Let's agree to agree. :)

Hunter: that kind of thing is starting to show up in the Discover tab. If it ever proved compelling enough, it might eventually move to the home timeline but so far it seems to not quite be compelling enough.

Another angle that I've been considering: what if something could watch your home timeline, a list timeline, or another user's home timeline and try to notify you (via sms or push) when something "important" happens? A "breaking news" bot so that you could feel "safe" not checking your tweets all the time... combating FOMO a bit.

Even better, the bot would only break news on unread tweets (which would require that Twitter store the "last viewed tweet").

Can't help wondering if reading + curating vs just reading seems to imply a new style of 2 column, playlist building layout for non mobile UI.

It's true that anything outside the main timeline feels superfluous as if it were an ad, but at the same time, there's a trade off with diluting the primary content.

I always liked the prior design of Twitter that felt more like two content columns, rather than content column plus 'blogroll'/menu column.

I think Twitter could learn a lot about hashtags by looking at how Tumbr curates streams: see stoweboyd.com.

'By exploiting tags and their role in curation, and quietly repositioning the company as a media player, Tumblr is a giant step ahead of Twitter.'