Ill Communication

Twitter is changing. Whilst the technology is the same, the way it is being used (or perhaps the way I use it?) has been slowly evolving.

Evolution is a good thing, but that does mean that I now find myself evolving how I use and interact with Twitter.

Maybe I need to slim down my followers list and remove those that are only making noise.

I include those who have endless conversations between themselves, for me that’s just noise.

Hashtags present another issue, whilst they can be useful they are now used in other ways which add to the noise.

I’m worried that I’m actually considering the categorisation of some Twitter posts as “types of noise”, but maybe that is what is needed?

Whilst I can use apps like TweetDeck to filter out “types of noise”, it would be better to have opt-in than blanket messaging?

But then, that’s not Twitter, is it?

I’m really not complaining about Twitter or those who I follow, although a little self-policing would help.

After all, what happens when you put 100 people in a room mostly talking to themselves?

Comments

  1. I’m almost certainly guilty of “adding to the noise”, in that it’s not unknown for me to have conversations via Twitter.

    I know I “shouldn’t”, but it’s convenient to reply there rather than going off to email or wherever.

    In fact, I think Twitter in some ways is like a chat client – it’d be good to have a private “channel”, similar to IRC etc., but not limited to just direct messages (which suck to some degree or other) – and maybe that’ll be the way it goes in the end.

    Then again, I still can’t see how Twitter is ever going to be worth the money invested in it. Maybe I just don’t have the necessary imagination for these things…

  2. Noise management and the lack thereof is the main reason I tend to only look at twitter occasionally.

    Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that twitter is just noise.

  3. Simon, it’s hard to peg really. It’s very much one of those things which only start to reveal themselves over time.

    In other words you need to give it a try and see.

  4. I tried it twice, but it never revealed itself to me. I find it incredibly cliquey and even more prone to making me feel inadequate than blogging.

    And I know you don’t like Facebook, but really I find it much more genuine. I am surrounded by my friends and their status updates, news and photos and it’s just an effortless way of keeping in touch with people. Yes, I could email them, but with the best will in the world, I just *don’t*. Whereas with Facebook, they’re all there, in one place.

    Twitter just seems very cold and exclusive in comparison, not to mention very limited in functionality.

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