A number of folks I have spoken to about Twitter complain about one big problem. The main reason that causes them to walk away from Twitter overload. They join Twitter, start following closely related people (brother, sister, boyfriend) and then start branching out. Eventually their Twitter stream starts growing to point where they can’t possibly keep up with all the tweets. A new study by PARC and MIT sheds some light on this problem and they even offer a new client.

This story is similar for me too. When I first joined Twitter I followed some people I knew, and then I started following celebrities. My first brush with overload came when I started to follow @joerogan – you know him right? He’s the guy that used to host Fear Factor. Well, I found out he also hosts UFC fights too. One evening while I was checking my Twitter stream, he started tweeting about the fights. This drowned out every other tweet forced me make some serious Twitter-Choices.

I imagine many of you Twitter users have either gotten to this point or eventually will. For the majority that have this problem, they will abandon Twitter. It’s true, according to Edison Research’s “Twitter Usage In America” – only 7% of Twitter users are actually using it.

So this is a problem, and some are starting to work on solving it. Like these guys from PARC and MIT. They have even created a twitter client, named Eddi, that helps you better understand and view your stream. Here’s a video of what the Eddi client looks like:

What do you do to manage Twitter overload?