I love Twitter chatter, but sometimes there can be just too much noise, especially if there is an event being talked about heavily and people are using those annoying hashtags before the #word. If you couldn’t care less about hearing the chatter about these events, then you’ll be looking for a way of filtering them out – or considering closing your Twitter desktop client until the event is over!

My friend Nik posted a godsend last night, especially for the desktop Twitterrific users out there. It’s just one simple line to pop into Terminal (Applications > Terminal) to filter out certain tweets and hit enter. This is the line I’m using…

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string "(please RT|RT please|Facebook|Austin|[sS][xX][sS][wW]|#[sS][xX][sS][wW])"

From Nik’s blog;

The one above is one that I’m using on the desktop (apart from the SXSW mentions) and I’ve used it previously to hide annoying Twitter competitions and the like. To filter out tweets with other terms, simply manipulate the expression in brackets to your needs. You can enter URLs, hashtags and the like to you needs, but be sure to remember that for now, the terminal command will overwrite the existing expression instead of adding things to it so you’ll need to enter the entire thing once again. I remain hopeful that the Icon Factory will add a UI for this functionality (even if it’s just a basic ‘exclude’ list). There’s plenty more options to tinker with via the Terminal if you read the Twitterrific 3.2 Read Me included with the Twitterrific download.

I have a feeling that I will be updating terminal quite a bit. I considered filtering the hashtag altogether, but then that would probably make Twitterrific too quiet! Now, if only Tweetie had a built in filter…