Managing Tweets 2.0

I first got my twitter account in 2008. I quickly realized that unlike Facebook, Twitter was a less-personal form of social media. You didn't necessarily need to be friends with someone you were following. So when I began increasing my list of people to follow I learned how obnoxious and spam-like some people were, so without hesitation I "un-followed" them.

If following people was so impersonal, I assumed un-following them would be similar, and not as malicious as the dreaded "de-friending" on Facebook. However with today's introduction of My6sense for Twitter, I'm beginning to think otherwise.

My6sense is a feature of Google Chrome that will track your online reading behavior in order to gain an understanding of your online preferences (much like an RSS feed). Once it gathers this information it will bring stories it thinks you will prefer reading to the forefront of the stream and while burying stories you are likely to be uninterested in.

This week My6sense introduced a component for Twitter. It is used on Twitter in the same fashion as Google Chrome, however it buries tweets you are unlikely interested in.

When I first heard about this concept my initial thought was if you feel the need to "bury" uninteresting twitter accounts, why don't you just unfollow them and only follow people whose tweets you enjoy reading? Or has Twitter become so personal so that "unfollowing" is now considered unfriendly twitter etiquette?

Is Twitter the new Facebook?