Illuminate: Taking your Twitter Feed out of the Dark

Commenting, replying and sharing posts on social media presents an opportunity that most can’t pass up. Interacting with posts can be incredibly enticing. Liking, retweeting and replying helps a user build their own presence, curate their own online persona, and show their appreciation for other people’s contents. Yet while users are building their profiles, with each share comes the potential to connect their account with topics and people they don’t want to be associated with. To make matters worse, a modern Twitter feed can be filled with content from users you’ve never heard of before, and with no other context may convince you to interact with it.

Select the topics you don’t want want to be associated with

To combat this, we’re presenting a concept for our browser extension “Illuminate”. Illuminate takes your Twitter feed out of the dark by automatically tagging the accounts on your feed with information that isn’t readily available. By scouring the timelines of other users, Illuminate automatically synthesize hundreds of their tweets, generating topic tags. These topic tags can be anything from “Profanity” to “North Korea”. If Illuminate finds a tag that you’ve labeled as undesirable, it will let you know of the association before you end up retweeting from that account.

Looks like we’ve found a pretty negative account, better steer clear.

Illuminate was built in conjunction with Twitter power users, and social media gurus. While exploring how they interacted with their feeds, we noticed an inherent distrust with the information on their feed. We also recognized that their desire to post or share the content they see shouldn’t be impeded. Our design allows users to explore more information at a glance than ever before, but still gives them the autonomy to interact with the content that’s important to them, even if it goes against their set preferences.

Updating your preferences while browsing.

Content on social media sites can be unpredictable. Illuminate also allows users to update their preferences mid-session, ensuring that they can “filter” content as they wish. Illuminate also serves up “recommended topics” based on their currently blocked list, so that users don’t always have to remember dozens of individual topics.

Illuminate lets you search for topics, not concepts, allowing you to make the final decision on the content you’re seeing.

With Illuminate, we hope to simplify the social media browsing experience, and ensure that interacting with the content on your feed is safe, reliable, and never causes anxiety.

Illuminate is currently in development. To download a technical demo, go to https://github.com/Luxapodular/tweetTagger.