Real-time Twitter streams – excuse me while I go smash my head against the wall

I remember when Friendfeed first burst upon the scene and how much I liked it. One of the things that I liked that unlike Twitter it did an automatic page refresh at a certain rate of time, a period of time that unless you were a madman like Scoble would give you plenty of time to catch up in a glance what was new.

Then one day the team behind Friendfeed got this brilliant idea to turn on what they called their real-time display. This meant that your timeline would constantly refresh every time a new post was made by anyone you followed. For those that maybe followed a hundred or less people this wasn’t too bad but the moment that you started getting over the 500 range, and especially if you made the insane choice to follow any of the big names, you were suddenly faced with a never-ending stream of information and an acute need for anti-nausea pills.

That was one of the reasons why I ended up leaving Friendfeed because I didn’t, and still don’t, see the need for a constant flood of information and the inevitable headache that comes from trying to quickly decipher what is important and what isn’t.

Well it seems that Twitter is now going to go down this road and unleash a veritable tsunami of 140 character messages. Through their User Streams API the plan is to slowly provide real-time access to our user streams to all those Twitter clients out there.

Now apparently TweetDeck is one of the client developers that Twitter is providing early access to this new API and in order to get us ready the team at TweetDeck have made an early alpha of their client using this new API available. They have also put together a 2 minute video of what this new way of using Twitter is going to be like.

Thanks to Mark over at SiliconANGLE for the link to the video but if you’ll excuse me I need to make a trip to the drugstore to stock up on aspirin and Gravol.