Over on its official Developers Blog, Twitter has announced two new fields that will be added to the metadata that is contained within all tweets, allowing developers using Twitter’s API to better filter and improve the overall quality of the stream.

A new filter attribute will let applications that display tweets by value, with a rating of “none”, “low”, “medium” and (eventually) “high”, with the latter two entries correlating with the “Top Tweets” results for searches made on Twitter.com.

Developers using this functionality will be able to strip out low-quality tweets from their products, significantly reducing noise.

The second field is a new language attribute that allows developers to specify the language in which a tweet is written, meaning that, for example, English-only tweets could be pulled using the API.

Twitter has outlined the necessary code for developers:

"status": {
"created_at": "Tue Oct 30 21:12:37 +0000 2012",
"id": 263387958047027200,
"id_str": "263387958047027200",
"text": "Better late than never, statuses/retweets_of_me is joining the API v1.1 method roster: https://t.co/jYz3MJnb ^TS",
"geo": null,
"coordinates": null,
"place": null,
"filter_level": "medium",
"lang": "en",
...
}

The filter attribute is expected to roll out on February 20th, with the language field following shortly afterwards. Developers can use Twitter’s calendar to keep up-to-date with all planned changes to its API.