Twitter should be more like Facebook.. 
I’ll tell you why:
Ever got a friend on Facebook that was using a Facebook Application called Farmville or Mafia Wars? Good change you have.. Since Farmville has around 69.000.000 monthly users and their mobile version is also called a ‘smash hit‘. So if those are unique users, a smashing ~20% of all 350.000.000 Facebook users is using this game. Of your (average) 130 friends there is probably one that uses it.. not even including Mafia Wars (26.000.000 monthly active users :)).
But.. for everybody who has never used Facebook or has no friends I included a screenshot below.
As you can see on the screenshot, Facebook gives you the possibility to ‘hide’ the message. This actually has been proven extremely useful (at least..for me). I don’t want to know if somebody just “completed level 1 of Strawberries mastery”, “found a pig in his backyard” or even “killed a neighbor farmer because he stole the pumpkin that I grew for seven years because I had nothing better to do”.
But recently I got the following in my Twitter stream…
Aaaaaaaah.. people that normally tweet interesting stuff now tweet an overload of uninteresting messages. Obviously this is in the interest of Foursquare and some people might find it very interesting.. but not me. I don’t care if you have finally got the “I’m constantly drinking coffee at the Startbucks”-badge or you “are the mayor of a trainstation”. Seriously.. if I want to know I will start using Foursquare, become your friend there and start sharing also.
Coming to the conclusion: Twitter should make the ’source’ part of a tweet useful and allow users to block or hide certain sources like Foursquare, Gowalla or even more spammy ones!
Until they have implemented this.. I probably have to unfollow all Gowalla and Foursquare users.. 
or..
People that want to earn badges, become mayor or the local cafeteria, or something.. could not automatically share those messages via Twitter.
People that want to share a location, could use geo-tagging. Please also stay tweeting interesting stuff.. I don’t care if you’re “taking a sh*t” geo-tagged somewhere.. except maybe here.
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Wait. You mean you don’t want to read about my new mayorship of the local train station? Weird. Luckily with me, at least you know that after two or three days of intense 4sq-ing I’ll quit and move on, a la Spymaster. I’m only interested to see their lead gen approach. Praized and Aardvark are also beta-ing social lead gen approaches. Looks like an interesting next move.
I agree it would be good to add some ways of tuning out certain statements. I was going to say conversations but I notice these are almost universally statements being pushed into your Twitter feed. Not great conversation.
Having said all that my banal 4sq comments have generated more replies than my Tweets normally do. And this would not have happened from geo-loc’ed tweets because followers are interested in me visiting Local Matters or Site Spect not an XY pair.
Hi Robin, haven’t seen those 4sq tweets for some time indeed
Main point I wanted to make is that Twitter can finally make the ’source’ information useful.