Posted by Alan

Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, wants to make twitter more seamless to switch between public and private messaging.

Currently, the switch isn’t easy.

They are experimenting with ways to highlight tweets that are most relevant to you when you visit the service. There are three ways that could be done:

1. completely automated algorithms
2. human curation
3. a combination of human curation and automated algorithms

The first would be nirvana, but like some of google’s search automation, or some of the terrible article spinners that lazy marketers use, 100% automation would probably be an awful result. The second would be great for employment, but too expensive and very bad for the company’s bottom line. So a combination of automation and human editing or curation could do the trick. Facebook is already going down the combination path and it seems to be working.

It will be very interesting to see if they can do it.