You do seem to be correct. I would probably attribute that to a rounding error, but I’d expect more from something published by the Washington Post. Very unfortunate. Beyond the statistical error, the point still stands.

Laura, this is a very good point, but I would file this complaint under the Twitter does a bad job of explaining itself category. There are several recommendations I can make to correct your problem.

The best solution is probably going to be to use lists. It is a built-in feature of Twitter. You can go an create a list of just your friends and exclude anyone who is too noisy of tweeter.

Another solution would be to enable “mobile notifications” for specific users you wish not to miss. It will send a notification via SMS when that person tweets.

A third solution would to use a third party tool I actually really like called Shuush (http://shuu.sh). It visually filters out noisy twitter users minimizing the size of there tweets and increasing the size of quieter users.

Please let me know if any of these solutions end up working out for you 🙂

How do other people solve this problem (other than getting twitter notifications from select few people…)