14 May
2009

Twitter Users : Keep Those Obsessions In Check

toomanytweets

Here’s a decent tip that it seems very few people are taking heed of in the world of Twitter – if you’re obsessed with something, and it’s not an obsession that has caused people to start following you, please don’t go crazy on it.

Someone in my stream (it’d be rude to name names) recently decided to give a running commentary on the entire 90 minutes of a 2nd division football playoff game. A sure fire way to get yourself de-followed, especially by someone who has signed up to hear your thoughts on the future of media. Or how about the guy who managed to spoil Star Trek by liveblogging the whole thing using the #twitflix tag – this is annoying enough, but what about the people sat near him in the cinema! As Eric Vespe put it: “There’s no difference between what you’re doing now and what the loud teenagers constantly texting during movies do”.

Twitter is still in it’s infancy, so there are no hard and fast rules, but earlier in the week we had a little round table chat and came to the conclusion that flooding of any kind is a sure fire way to make yourself unpopular. One choice quote was “No one is interesting enough to have over 20 tweets a day” which is a nice round figure I’ll be sticking to, and advising people to do the same.

But as Clay Shirky said “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”. So rather than complaining, I’ll suggest a fix – equip Twitter with is a sleep button, so I can hide all updates from someone I follow for a short period of time. That way, when someone is at Cannes, or SXSW, or the FA Cup Final, I can just give them a little “time out” for a few days. The next Twitter client to do this might tempt me away from my Tweetie addicition.

posted by Kev at 15:24   _comments (3)

3 Responses to “Twitter Users : Keep Those Obsessions In Check”

May 14th, 2009

Kev, nice post. It’s a question of ‘brand v personal’ use in my opinion. If I’m following John Motson I should expect that 90% of his posts will be football related. Similarly, if I’m following Joe Bloggs I can expect that his tweets will be on a variety of random subjects.

At the end of the day it all boils down to your intended use of Twiiter. For me, my tweets are about me and what I’m interested in (why would it be anything else) – if people that follow me are not interested then unfollow me. I really wont be that fussed.


By Dan

 
May 14th, 2009

I follow a strict rule in terms of who I follow. If they appear 3+ times in succession, (without being interrupted by someone else’s tweets) then they are flooding my stream and get the boot.

This works for someone who follows roughly sixty people – there must be an equation to adjust the number based on following more/less people.


By Ben

 
May 14th, 2009

Hi,

I totally agree with the main idea of your post, but however I do follow people that are extremely respectful of people who follow them and only post according to their core purpose (no personal stuff is the twitter is about digital for example) and some manage to post around 30 relevant tweets a day without spamming.

I think that the same happened with the regular blogging, the so-called “influential bloggers” started to blog about their personal life too and that made them less relevant after all.

Please people: run 2 twitter accounts one personal for your friend and one with “professional” info only where you would not spam me with your life !



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