A Torrent of Tweets: Managing Information Overload in Online Social Streams Michael Bernstein Lichan Hong Abstract MIT CSAIL Palo Alto Research Center Twitter streams are on overload: active users receive 32 Vassar Street 3333 Coyote Hill Road hundreds of items per day and existing interfaces force Cambridge, MA 02139 Palo Alto, CA 94304 us to march through a chronologically-ordered morass
[email protected] [email protected] to find tweets of interest. We propose that the research community engage with microblogging feed Sanjay Kairam Ed H. Chi consumption practice: how do users manage the Palo Alto Research Center Palo Alto Research Center incoming flood of updates, and how can we help them 3333 Coyote Hill Road 3333 Coyote Hill Road do it? We have pursued these questions through Palo Alto, CA 94304 Palo Alto, CA 94304 formative studies and prototype development. An
[email protected] [email protected] online survey and semi-structured interviews with information stream users revealed that users assign Bongwon Suh different value to feed items according to tie strength, Palo Alto Research Center topical relevance and serendipitous discovery. Faced 3333 Coyote Hill Road with an intractable number of these streams, users Palo Alto, CA 94304 either manicure follow lists for manageability or give up
[email protected] on reading everything and subscribe to many more individuals. We introduce an alternative Twitter client called Eddi that groups tweets in a user’s feed into topics mentioned explicitly or implicitly. Using Eddi, Twitterers can browse for tweets of interest by topic, Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).