This week, I was lucky enough to catch up with Aaron White and Chris Ricca, the co-creators of a new Twitter service that promises to ‘fight Twitter noise’.
Proxlet is a way to filter your Twitter feed. Nothing new there…Twitter allows you to create lists, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and the like allow you to manage those lists. But it seems Proxlet wants to take things one step further, and make things simpler. It promises to “block apps, mute users, and filter tags on Twitter” – and it’s getting some high profile attention.
“Proxlet works with Twitter.com & the most popular native clients to fight noise,” explains Aaron. “It can block annoying apps, over-talkitive users, and irrelevant hash tags. Ultimately, we want Proxlet to be the quality control tool for your tweet stream. People who love Twitter, but wish they had more control, are most certainly our target audience.”
The Proxlet system is certainly user friendly, but the list of supported clients could use some work. There’s a Chrome extension, and support for TweetDesk [EL: corrected on Proxlet.com] Tweetdeck Desktop, Twitter for iPhone, Twidroyd, Seesmic for Android and Spaz, but nothing for Tweetdeck or Hootsuite as yet.
Good stock
Aaron White, co-creator of Proxlet
Technically, the Proxlet developers know their stuff. Chris served two years on the drop.io development team and Aaron studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “[I] fell in love with the startup world & hacker work ethic,” Aaron enthuses. “Chris & I met over Twitter, and when we were both publicly ‘kevetching’ about the noise, we decided to take action. Proxlet has been a fantastic learning experience both technically, and in terms of bringing value to a lot of folk.”
Impact on Twitter
So what do the pair think the impact of Proxlet might be on Twitter usage, and on apps like paper.li, known as much for irritating Twitter users en masse as it is for proving visually attractive ‘digital newspapers’?
“Anecdotally, I am seeing people using the service following more people than they did before using Proxlet,” Chris explains. “Which makes sense – we can only bring in so much information during a day, so if I turn down the knob on certain types of information, I can follow more people. In the longer term, I would like to see services be better citizens on Twitter. If they are too flagrant, people will just shut them off.”
A dream tool for spammers?
Talking of bad behaviour on Twitter, my first thought when learning of the Proxlet service was that it was clearly open to abuse. The blurb promises it will “Block apps, mute users, and filter tags on Twitter.” Are the pair concerned that people will use Proxlet to effectively pretend to follow people, just to grow their reciprocal follower numbers?
“I think Proxlet appeals to those folks who are looking to enhance the quality of their stream, rather than ‘game’ the system,” Aaron contends. “Those who try to amass a following via reciprocity tricks aren’t trying to solve a quality problem.”
“Yeah – I’m not concerned with people trying to boost follower counts,” Chris confirms. “You can usually spot those accounts from a mile away, anyway. Above a certain number, every follow is fake.”
Improving the Twitter experience
I’m not convinced that Proxlet won’t be abused a fair bit, but it’s true enough that it isn’t the only tool to make that kind of ‘gaming’ possible. But what of the argument that using a proxy is a needless step – if you don’t like the sort of stuff a person posts, unfollow?
Chris Ricca, co-creator of Proxlet
“We built Proxlet because we wanted more control over our Twitter experience,” explains Chris. “For more casual users, following and unfollowing will probably be enough. But we wanted more options. It has made Twitter useful for me again.”
“I find it very useful to mute folks who are at conferences that I am not interested in,” adds Aaron. “Sometimes, it’s enough to mute the conference’s hash-tag. However, some folks don’t always use the tag, so muting them for a few days can do the trick. Alternatively, if someone is tweeting about a live sporting event, I might throw a quick mute on them. *Especially* if they are rooting for the wrong team…”
Of course, even during the big game, you might not want to ignore people who address you directly. “We’ve tried to be careful with Proxlet to provide control, but not break the social fabric of Twitter,” assures Aaron. “You will still see a tweet if someone mentions you, or direct messages you, even if they are muted.”
The future of Proxlet
So will the developers be using the usage data they gather to help make Twitter a nicer place?
“It would be great if Proxlet could become an early warning system for spammy behavior on Twitter,” says Aaron. “Would love to share that data with folks, and offer auto-blocking features if they were valuable. We’ll be preparing an in-depth look at some of the muting trends, stay tuned! Suffice it to say, you can probably guess the top three apps or so.”
“Proxlet’s plans right now are to learn from our users and improve the experience, and thankfully our costs are low enough to let us do exactly that.”
It’s certainly an interesting proposition, but for now I’ll be keeping it old school and continuing to control the quality of my home feed by choosing who to follow wisely. Then again, those paper.li mentions are indeed incessant, so there may come a day when Proxlet’s (term filter option) becomes irresistible.
Emily
