Saturday, August 13, 2011

Block Out Noisy Twitter Users and Focus on the Quiet Ones with Shuush

Shuush is “a web-based Twitter reader that displays the updates of the people you follow in relation to the frequency of their tweet. It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.” It gives each user a volume level between 1 and 11 and then sizes their tweets according. In a nutshell, Shuush is a creative way to block out noisy Twitter users so that you have more time to focus on the more quiet tweeters who are often overshadowed.

Getting Started

Getting started with Shuush.
To get started, all you have to do is click to “flick the switch.” You’ll then notice that there tweets of all different sizes in your timeline.

Timeline

Shuush timeline view.
As you can probably already tell, the larger sized tweets are from those users who usually get drowned out by overly chatty users. Likewise, the tweets of those users who post quite often are much smaller – some even illegible.
Also, when you scroll your mouse over the avatar picture of any user in your timeline, you’ll see their Shuush volume level. Note: You can also see your own level at the top right of the page.

Volume Level

An “11″ is the highest level you can have and it means that you’re a pretty chatty Twitter user. The closer you are to this number, the smaller your tweets will be in the timeline. A “1″ is the lowest and means that you barely tweet at all. The closer you are to this number, the larger your tweets will be in the timeline.
The volume level is calculated based on how many tweets per day a user has averaged since joining Twitter. Seeing that levels 10 and 11 are pretty much unreadable, you definitely want to strive for a level of 1-9.
Large Tweet vs Small Tweet on Shuush.

Final Thoughts

Right now there isn’t anything else you can do in Shuush. Since it’s just a reader, you can’t interact with replies, DMs, or retweets.
Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to enlarge those really small, illegible tweets. So all of those overactive tweeters suffer because you’ll miss what they’re saying, but hey at least the underdogs will get some attention now, right?

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