Twitter is the first social Web phenomenon I’ve embraced without putting Cali Lewis in between me and the rest of the world. I’ve followed people conservatively, usually after they’ve added value to my Twitter experience through positive @ replies. There are some people I’ve followed on Twitter like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble who I love, but they tweet too much for my taste, so I’ve un-followed them. I prefer following people who only tweet about 10 - 20 times a day. Otherwise my pages get overwhelmed by one or two people.
My personal Twitter etiquette dictates that I try to only tweet once an hour at the most. I only will @ reply once or twice per original tweet. My goal is to add value or be relevant without dominating the space. The exception is late at night when I’m missing God.
I would like Twitter to provide a way to group people I follow. There are some very chatty people I love, but I don’t want to always see there multitudes of chat replies. I HATE that the only solution, for now, is to un-follow them.
When I load the page I like to get a snapshot of what most of the people I’m following are doing, not a page filled with @replies from a single person. At the same time, I don’t want to suggest that people @ reply less. It just isn’t for me.
For now, I’m going to not follow people who I’m extremely interested in. I hope my un-follow is only temporary. I want to group people based on how much they tweet because I want the Twitter information snapshot effect, but I still want to see what friends who tweet a lot are up to.
19 Comments
You make some good points here.
Totally understandable Neal. Lord knows Twitter can be hard to follow over an hour with lots of @replies. I’m guilty of that myself, BTW. Have to watch that. It gets out of hand sometimes. The tweets go fast and furious, and then boom, before you know it, you’ve sent out a hundred @replies in a few hours.
I agree with you about the groups. I am hoping that this is something that twhirl will incorporate into a future release.
I’ve felt the same way. There needs to be a way to throttle really chatty types. Almost as if you could assign less “weight” to users if you wanted. That way, all of their tweets wouldn’t show at first glance, just the most popular ones.
Thoughts for food.
I fully agree about the Twitter ideas.. I would love to be able to open my twitter page and get the last 25 twitters from Different people I am following rather then what happens now. Especially since I use tWirl mostly and the website as an archive
While you surely don’t have your @reply settings on ‘all’ & are likely happy w/the default setting, you might consider ‘no @ replies’; especially if you then track the ones you still want..
Just a tho’t but, whatever the case, I greatly enjoyed the one late night conversation of yours I got to take part in. ^_^
(|_|*cheers*|_|)
Thanx too for adding comments to your site; just don’t feel you have to reply. ~_^
It would be great if you could set preferences for how you follow each person.
For instance, you could follow me, but have an option to filter out all of my @replies that aren’t directed at you–then you get nothing but original tweets and replies to your tweets from me. Or filter out all my @replies that aren’t directed at people you follow–then you get only the conversations that you can actually read in their entirety and none of those replies to people you’ve never heard of.
Along the same line of per person preferences, I think it would help if Twitter could detect a person’s Twitterspasms: the series of tweet after tweet within a short span of time. If you could tell Twitter that when Scoble or Calacanis posts more than 3 tweets in an hour, stop following them until they settle down again.
It’s so hard to set perimeters, though. Sometimes @replies connect us to conversations that matter to us. Sometimes they don’t.
The same think can happen during a Twitterspasm.
It’s really the challenge of creating great software. It’s the balance between just the right features to make a solution elegant and all the features a user could want. It’s the balance between Apple and Microsoft.
One of the many reasons I love using Flock as my browser is because I can set the sidebar to update off of Twitter, showing me the single most recent tweet from each person I follow, with those people displayed in order of how recently they sent out a tweet. It’s a very fast, clean, snapshot view, and if something catches my eye, I can go to the page tab I always keep on Twitter for further reading. It restores a balance, as no one fills the entire space with only their @replies.
Good post - I think it would be nice to have groups too - at the moment I guess the fix is to have a few Twitter accounts.
Another thing that would be nice would be to follow pre-sets of interest, so new (or existing users for that matter) could follow people with similar interests with one click.
Grouping would be a great feature. There are some people I follow who’s tweets I don’t want to miss but they get lost in the clutter.
Yea, I’m frustrated too. Sometimes the most valuable things come from the people who get drowned out. Yesterday I missed a whole bunch of tweets from my wife. It was embarrassing. (She’s in Germany on business and I’m trying to pay close attention to her tweets.) There really needs to be more controls at the “following person” level so you can compensate for the different ways that people use the service.
Man, no kidding about Scoble. He’s out of control!
I definitely agree with your frustration. Twitter is treated by a lot of people as a sort of instant messaging client, which it isn’t. I think I may follow your “un-following” strategy.
Twitter is an excellent idea, but people need to go back to the basics of Twitter. I want to know what people are doing, not find out that they’re spending their lives Twittering by the sheer magnitude of Tweets they issue.
I agree Neal. I’ve had to unfollow Scoble and a few others too.
Sadly, I’m probably one you’ve unfollowed too since I do tend to over do it in replies. I’m learning to direct message more as it is really more appropriate.
Great post, friend!
Jeff McCord
I agree 100%. I was just telling my wife today that Twitter needs the ability to group. I finally stopped following all the news like CNN, Ars, etc, because it drowned-out all my IRL friends, and other people who don’t clog my page.
Just an idea — haven’t tried this. What about a 2nd Twitter account with which you track only these loquacious friends of yours? Hook it up to a 2nd free Gmail account, which you then add to iChat, and you could have a rolling ticker tape of these folks’ replies, etc. That you never have to log into Twitter to see. Think I’ll try that myself, actually, as I have the same dilemma. I’ll let you know whether it works for me.
Hi to Cali…
Sean
There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask since reading this. Actually, I did ask Cali, but she insisted that I direct it to you. What do you mean when you say that you’re “missing God”?
I don’t care whether you answer, but I just had to ask. I don’t guess I’ve ever heard that expression before. Intrigued me.
-Sean
How about this: http://twittersnooze.com/
It allows you to unfollow someone for a period of days. It’s not a perfect solution, but it might help a bit.
It also allows you to announce that you’re taking a hiatus from following someone on Twitter…I hardly think that’s necessary. People are who they are. If they tweet a lot, that’s what they do. There’s really no reason to “put someone on notice” that you’re going to stop following them for a day in protest of their Twitter verbosity. Just unfollow them, you don’t have to be mean about it.
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