Once Only

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