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If your Twitter timeline is too overwhelming, then I have three apps that can help you slice and dice your feed into something more digestible.
First up, Little Voices. I wrote about the Little Voices app last week, which filters out replies, links and images from your feed, leaving you with a timeline of only plain-text tweets. The app is all or nothing because it lacks any preferences that would let you adjust filters to customize your feed. Little Voices is free and ad-free and worth checking out, but you might find it filters out too large a chunk of Twitter for your liking. If that’s the case, the next two apps offer more flexible filters.
TweetCaster for Twitter is free, but it features an ever-present banner ad along the bottom edge. You can plunk down $4.99, £3.99, AU$7.99 for an in-app purchase to remove the ads. Free or paid, TweetCaster provides four filters for your timeline: Media, Image Gallery, Links and Hide RTs. You can find these filters by scrolling to the top of your Timeline as well as to the top of the Mentions view.
Enlarge ImageScreenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
The Media and Links filters basically do the opposite of what Little Voices does. The Media filter shows only tweets with a photo or a video, and the Links filter shows only tweets that include a link. The Image Gallery filter is probably the least useful of the bunch; it shows a grid thumbnails from recent tweets in your feed. You can tap to expand a thumbnail but there is no way to see the tweet of an image for any context. Lastly, the Hide RTs filter presents a feed free of retweets, which I like.
The third app here is Tweetlogix for Twitter. It costs $2.99, £2.29, AU$4.49. Tweetlogix offers five filters that let you mute a variety of items, including users, keywords, retweets and retweeters.
To find the filters, open your timeline, tap the More button in the lower-right corner and then tap Filters. Here you’ll find the five filters: Muted Users, Muted Keywords, Muted Clients, Muted Retweets and Muted Retweeters.
Enlarge ImageScreenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Muted Users lets you remove certain people from your feed without unfollowing them, while muted keywords lets you remove all of the inane #yolo tweets, for example, from your feed. The Muted Retweets filter lets you remove all retweets from your various timelines, but Muted Retweeters might be the best filter of the bunch. It lets you remove all of the retweets of anyone you follow while still letting through any of their regular tweets. It’s perfect for those friends you follow who seemingly retweet everything they see on Twitter but still occasionally offer up a gem of a tweet that you don’t want to miss.
Lastly, Tweetlogix lets you restrict your filters so that they apply only to certain timelines. From the main Filters page, tap Filter Scope in the upper-right corner. From here, you can choose to apply your filters to the Home, Mentions, Lists and Search timelines.
