These are the ways I will end up seeing your article or link more than once:
In my aggregator, I saw your blog post before you tweeted about it
Using Readtwit (the only web service integrated with Twitter I could get excited about in 2009), I saw your blog post through the Readtwit RSS feed before I saw the tweet about it, which I already saw in the Readtwit feed item's initial paragraph
you syndicate your Facebook status updates to Twitter, or the other way around
Using my iPhone-based Twitter client, I saw your tweet, then saw it again in my desktop-based Twitter client, then another time in my web-based Twitter client
Either way, I saw your post and/or tweet at least twice, and usually more times. I only need to see it once, usually. So how do I accomplish that? Ideas:
central messaging service where everything goes, synchronized with my mobile device du jour
unsubscribe from notifications (see below)
simplify, use only one consuming client for each messaging stream (Twitter especially)
multiple messaging clients that all talk to each other showing only the messages where I left off
Direct messages
In part this is bad setup on my part, but here are the amount of times I see a direct message, each time it's flagged as unread before I have to "read" it.
usually as an email, since I seem to get that first thanks to Exchange on my iPhone (using a Microsoft protocol on an Apple device to access a Google service...)
then as a push notification thanks to Boxcar
then in Tweetie 2 for the iPhone
then, likely, in Tweetie for the Mac
I could:
turn off email notification, but that's the last resort of direct messages to make sure I see it
turn off Boxcar notifications, but I like seeing it in the notification flow
just deal with the unread status in Tweetie 2 for iPhone
just deal with the unread status in Tweetie 2 for Mac
Matt Haughey suggests that a read status in Twitter's database could help. http://twitter.com/mathowie/status/7096785779