Twitter should separate personal streams and business streams

I like Twitter. I like having conversations with people line by line. It’s a lot more personal, immediate, and direct than blogging, which is fun.

But I think some of the rules of blogging still apply to Twitter. For instance, some blogs are really about business. They’re promoting a service or a product. And that’s fine, because the reader knows what they’re going into.

I think people on Twitter should be careful to separate their businesss twitter streams from their personal twitter streams. Because they come in different categories. A good personal stream can (and probably should) have some business links in it occasionally. That’s a more complete picture.

But now twitter should find some some way to mark that difference. Chris Pirillo’s twitter stream is essentially a constant list of links to the Chris Pirillo show. Which is fine. But it’s not what I was expecting when I started following him.

Granted, it takes five seconds to pull his feed from my list - so it’s largely a non-issue. And I might do that someday.

But I think it would be neat if Twitter would segment their streams, maybe even create a second tab on the Twitter home page so that we can flip between the two types of streams. Or maybe let you tag each tweet as a business tweet or a personal tweet, and then it gets colored differently, and you can view them in one stream or in two.

In any case, it’s worth playing with.