2009
Twitter Users : Keep Those Obsessions In Check
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.

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