In my stream of people I'm following usually one person tweets way more often than everyone else. How can I restrict the feed to show just a representative sample, or a maximum number of tweets per day?
I'm pretty sure it would take a 3rd party tool or application to do this.
Edit. Putting a babbler mouth on a list still results in a separate list with a blabber mouth.
I found Cadmus, which put the most important tweets at top, this seems to get at what I'm looking for.
Your best bet is to unfollow them but add them to a twitter list. That way you can just check the list periodically to see what they have to say.
Downside is that they may be offended if they see you've unfollowed them - I usually address this by putting them into a flattering list name - such as "Awesome people".
They won't be able to DM you if you unfollow, but other than that it's business as usual.
What I've done is I created a private list called main, which includes all the people I'm following. If there's a person who overtweets but I don't want to unfollow them, I just remove them from main.
Not very practical but you could in theory follow the rss version of their feed and run that through yahoo pipes and apply filters there. The output might not be optimal and @ replying would be hard.
This answer was posted in the comments by phwd.
Twitter Throttle is a grease monkey script to make sure that in a stream everyone gets a chance to be heard, but no user gets more than a few tweets on the screen at one time.
http://jonefox.com/blog/2009/03/07/twitter-throttle/
While lists appeal to a sense of tidyness, I'm not tidy and I don't look at lists. In any case, lists justs shuffles the problem around from one stream to another.
If you're willing to use another tool to manage your Twitter account, you could set-up a HootSuite account and create a custom feed with that user and one without. Over time you can further filter the "does not talk too much" feed.
Try TweetDeck. It's free and cross-platform. At the bottom of each column is a filter button where you can enter the name (or names) of people to filter out. You can also create columns that only include the tweets of certain people that you choose.
I think the idea of unfollowing them and adding them to a list is a great one. But then if you find that it might offend them, then the only work around is to create specific lists for friends and other people's updates you might be really interested in and check the lists whenever you feel like checking out twitter. Another option would be to use a third party twitter app which lets you filter out that person.
