Posts tagged twitter

Photo by: Noël Zia Lee http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelzialee

I can’t help but think that perhaps I was wrong about twitter, it does have a use.  Having said that I still struggle with how to tame the useless information that comes across the platform. 

Okay, so my turnaround on Twitter was driven mainly by the newly updated Adobe Air app TweetDeck.  What I’ve learned to love about this product is that not only can I see my friend’s stream but I can set-up searches for keywords and it’ll provide the Tweets that fit my searches.  I’ve set up multiple columns to track things I’m interested in and I’ve found it’s given me a leg up on knowing what’s new and being able to react to specific issues.  The big feature I’d love for them to add is some NLP type stuff to aggregate the tweets into buckets so I don’t see 30 tweets that match my search where 25 of them are RTs.

I’ve also come to love the integration with TweetScoop which is a meme tracker that allows me to see in a tag cloud type format the memes that are active on Twitter. Any breaking news always ends up as a meme and I consider it my early alert system.

Ironically these features are features I could probably enjoy without ever having my own Twitter account.  The thing is, these features do what I need them to do: they take the fire hose of data coming through the system and distill it down to what I’m interested in. 

I can’t say the same for my own friend list.  I’ve recently had to un-follow a bunch of people because they’re living their life through Twitter.  It’s one thing to point out interesting articles, comment on other people’s tweets, or even comment on your own situation, but there has to be a limit.  At one point a friend of mine was tweeting verbatim comments from a marketing conference every 5 minutes.  I mean come on! That’s the activity of someone who doesn’t try and read his friend feed, someone who doesn’t realize what he’s asking his followers to wade through. And for us on the other end it’s maddeningly annoying.  I don’t mind when people tweet often, but every 5-10 minutes? No one’s that interesting. If you have that much to say, do a webinar, call a friend, write an email/blog entry, but above all remember Twitter only at 140 characters for a reason. 

It’s like I’ve found a new affection for Twitter only to realize I have to put up with the frustrations of reading through inane messages from "friends".  Listen it’s not that I don’t care about y’all but sometimes your messages wear thin.  Cliche time: It’s always great to have visitors come to visit, and it’s also good to see them go when they’ve overstayed their welcome.  And to that end I’ve decided I’m being ruthless with my friend list.  If you’re a 2 second tweeter then you’re dropped. 

The big failure of social media is the corruption of the word ‘friend’.  Social networks set themselves up to encourage you to accumulate friends, followers, contacts, and that’s taken the platforms and turned them into forums for acquaintances and colleagues to keep abreast of each other.  At the same time it’s reduced the value of the platform for interaction with true friends, people hold back because there are too many pseudo-friends that they have on Facebook, or they ignore the friend feed because they honestly don’t concern themselves with the lives of their social network ‘friends’.  I’d love for these services to call out the reality of the situation.  Some friends are more important than others, some are family, some are childhood buddies, and some are people you worked with 5 years ago and haven’t spoken to in 3 years other than through status updates. 

Oh what fun to dare to dream…