Despite what you might think, unlike Facebook, people do not really give a damn if you unfollow them on Twitter. Stop being such a wuss and just unfollow people whose tweets you don't want to see. If they're the rare case who gets back to you and asks you why, you can then provide them with valuable feedback.

I have an old friend I follow on twitter who tweets way to much garbage and I want to unfollow her, but I know for a fact she uses an unfollow tracker, and I KNOW it'll spite her. I wish there was a way to mute people right in Twitter.

If she's an old friend, just tell her (as an old friend) that you're not interested in her tweets and that's why you're unfollowing her. To rely on third-party services to avoid dealing with interpersonal relations is what is known as "being passive-aggressive".

Anyway, it's not like you're calling her baby ugly, it's just Twitter.

She might not take it well. You might then say he's better off without that kind of friendship, but that's not the outcome he wanted.

Actually no. People do. Heck I even wrote a simple ruby script to help me track when and what I said that caused people to unfollow me, and who it was to see if they important or not:

https://github.com/zbowling/followdiff

The real solution came with lists. Following has always been a vanity thing. There are people that I want to follow but don't want those people to know. Also I want to follow people out of respect but their volume is too high. Private lists give me that solution.

Slipstream is an interesting Chrome extension that also supports this feature. It is more powerful in that you can also hide tweets that contain keywords. I believe that it checks tweets as they are rendered to the page so you never have to see them getting removed from the page.

http://slipstre.am/

This is great and thanks for open sourcing the code.

There is also another chrome plugin called Proxlet http://proxlet.com which does something similar. Seems like there are many tools out there but discovery and marketing is all ways an issue.

Refynr is a much better tool http://refynr.com/. It works on Twitter as well as Facebook and you have much more granular control of what to include or not include.

Apologize in advance for the autorun video he has added to his home page ;<(.

Is there an equivalent for Facebook? Not necessarily to deal with 'annoying' people but I want to prioritize messages from a subset of friends/family.

You can set up lists of friends, and on every post there's a hide button, where you can either hide the person, or the kind of post.

If you'd rather use a native client with loads of features, including blocking people and keywords, give YoruFukurou a try https://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-en

Hibari (http://hibariapp.com/) is another native OS X client with muting (and, in my opinion, a nicer interface than YoruFukurou.)

Twitter really need to add this functionality to the core service. I use several different Twitter clients. I'm following a couple of users who I'd like to hide the tweets of, but it would potentially be awkward to unfollow them if they notice.

One native-Twitter solution available to you today is to create a private list containing only the people you'd like to read on a regular basis.

https://support.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter...

This is how I use twitter!

Lists are very useful if you follow are large number of people. Create a few smaller lists of the things you really want to see or that are important.

I created a list for the services I use, I check it once a day to see who's tweeted about something new and improved.

I have another list for co-workers and friends and check that one as my default.

I like that Twitter forces you to be honest about who you're following. Then again, I have the same problem with instant messaging's Appear Offline (it erodes the value of the network, and destroys the discoverability of weak connections).

What would be most useful for me is to mute someone for a set period of time.

If someone is off on a long series of tweets I don't care about, it would be nice to mute them for an hour or two until they're done.

Or if someone is tweeting from a conference and I don't care about it, I could mute them for a couple of days.

These are scenarios where I definitely don't want to unfollow, but I'd also like to not read dozens of uninteresting tweets.

Nice. One thing I'd really like would be the option only to see those tweets from someone that have been retweeted at least once - as a kind of filter for general interest. I've given no thought to whether that would be possible, though.

There's an easier way to do this on Twitter - I just have a private "friends" list on that has everyone I actually care about following on a day-to-day basis. I can follow tons of people, but I only regularly read tweets on that list.

What I would really want is a "Mark all as read" and to never see the same tweet again.