Twitter fatigue tangents
So, after the Collision Course last Wednesday night, I got chatting to Pat. He blurted out that he was getting tired of Twitter and had been tired of it for the past month. I have too. Is it an early adopter tax?
Pat blogged about it already. I may be subtracting and not adding, here goes.
I don’t like banana sandwiches
The glory of the Twitter stream is the randomness. Reading about babies, business, borked cars, new bands, gadgets, great quotes or funny stories. It’s not about the technology or bullshit evangelism it’s about the information. It used to be like that.
Twitter is a rubber ball. We’ve played with it, bounced it off walls. I ran around the place head-down Toro-style. I’ve cajoled and laughed. Made some great friends. Learned about others and myself. Been challenging and challenged. Had epiphanies. It wasn’t Twitter that gave that to me. It was the people.
Somewhere along the way, every Social Media Cock, Dick and Harry got in on the game. They are the bananas. Cloying and sticky. Just as the mainstream is starting to get it, I want to jump ship.
At the same time, I still find myself recommending the service to people. To friends so that they can experience the same things that I did and to businesses so they can learn how to “engage” (sorry – spit) with customers.
In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the what Twitter could do to change its model and make me heart it a little more.
Change the meaning of friendship
Give all ego obsessives a kick in the teeth by making the following and follower numbers private. Don’t publish following and followers on people’s pages. Instead, like Facebook, grab a small, random subset of people from each group and show them.
Twitter really should have it’s own recommendation engine, kind of like LinkedIn where someone can recommend a friend. But, for a X amount of days (just to mix it up).
Limit friendships
As a private user, I want to my Twitter communications to deepen relationships. With endless scope to add people and increase followers, that’s not possible. Scenesters and cads are the only ones that want to build up thousands of followers. You know what – make them pay for the privilege. Limit private user friendships to 200 follows and 250 followers max.
Ignoring business in this case, networking for business is a whole different demographic.
Information management
After spending any time on Twitter, the thing that hits you is the constant churn of information. It’s one of its best attributes. A crowning glory. However, how do you sift through the information you values?
I have thousands of DMs, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tag, order and search them right from the direct message box? Or how about being allowed to bulk export and delete?
A Twitter user’s timeline is only accessible back 160 pages or 3,200 tweets. This may seem like a lot but after any time on the service, you’ll notice that tweets really fly up there. Where are my microblog messages?
On Flickr’s free service, a user can have up to 200 images viewable at a time. If they have uploaded more than 200 photos, just the most recent 200 are viewable but they can upgrade to a Pro account to view the complete collection. Why doesn’t Twitter have a similar model?
Yawny McYawnerson
I don’t know how much satisfaction these suggestions would give me, but the the point is that I’m tired. Cutting follows or using Tweetdeck will not solve this for me. I won’t immediately move on, but I’m certainly not enamoured with the means of communication or the worst it brings out in some, at the moment.
The human relationships that sit on top of technology have complicated its use for me. The simplicity of moving from one tweet to the next with a sense of fun and scant regard is lost. There are no sneaky fags round the back of the Quad anymore. A smaller, more private, more personal communications medium whose brevity matches that of Twitter is needed. And before you suggest Friendfeed, it is the antithesis of this.
I don’t have any answers, just more bloody questions. I’m still working out the details. Excuse the Joycean tangents, by the way.
Agreed. Just after I recommended Twitter to my friend Dave as a way to get his research out to a wider public and engage with others in same field he reminded me that I had talked about getting tired of Twitter.
Like you I keep recommending it so others can experience it but I feel overwhelmed – it’s not the same little microcosm as it started out, where there were a few people whom I often got conversing with, like Pat, Damien, yourself, John Breslin, Bernie etc etc and now you’re all going past in a flood and I feel a bit fatigued.
Having said that I got tired of facebook for a few months and then eventually came back after they tweaked it and I didn’t have a flood of useless YouTube re-postings and forwarded emails. I wonder how Twitter can get its groove back for early adopters?
I was chatting to a friend in the Library and she commented on my facebook status, which she often does. Noticing this I went to tell her of twitter and how it’s kind of like facebook status but more fun but I stopped myself.
I don’t know why, possibly because I fear twitter turning into bebo and becoming a mindless “how many friends do you have?” kind of deal. I try to keep my followers and following lists pretty balanced, I like to follow those who follow me and visa versa, however it is people who have thousands of followers who, to me, kind of defeat the fun personal part of twitter.
I dunno, I think twitter is in a kind of limbo at the moment, like a teenager searching for an identity. Let’s hope it finds one that works for us all.
I get a lot of what you say, but is the problem not just all the SM gurus trying to pitch their wares?
I got my first qwitter message yesterday from some SEO bloke – in response to my excessive tweets about rugby. For me that was a result! But the fun is still there – you can still meet the same interesting people, get tips, have your say – so all that early stream of randomness is still there.
Your suggestions are great – not displaying the numbers might just be away to discourage the pests.
Really agree with Marie or Pixie as we call her, that’s the power of twitter, I know Maries name but I still call her by her twitter handle
All these friends but no its just buy my book, buy my pictures, buy something.
I still only converse with 20/30 people on there but get 30 followers a day
why
who knows, its certainly not my repartee or wit.
Its become a numbers game, it would be in twitters interest to immediately remove numbers.
That would even the field and would be like “anti viagra” to the people who care on numbers
Great post Lex
Alexia – I’d suggest following your own advice. Cut the amount of people you’re following down to 200/250. I used to follow a lot more people than I do now (was about 170, now err… 89), and I’ve found it a lot more manageable. Follow really interesting people. Follow your friends. Cut out the dross. Keep tabs on people you’re not sure about, and if they don’t say anything interesting for a week or so, unfollow them. It’s not like you still won’t hear them if they @ you.
And you’re not the only one thinking like this at the moment. Several bloggers I read are thinking about the whole “nature of Twitter is changing” thing, but most of them are thinking of ways they can change the way they use it to better benefit themselves, rather than ditching it entirely.
Well I only spoke to you about this this evening, twitter for me has gone mental I blame @stephenfry!
During the shorty campaign I started of with 245 followers as I type this I have over 880 followers have of whom do not talk to me. I think these guys will fall of the face of the earth soon enough, if they don’t converse I will cull them.
Like Pat I have 30 or so people that I talk to on a regular basis but I will talk to others if I see something of interest. But nowadays it is all about your twitter grade how elite you are etc which is a terrible shame, even this morning I see Kevin Rose has a post on techcrunch talking about how to gain more followers!
I will be starting myself to keep the numbers down, because I love this so much I don’t want it to be ruined by the social media whores!
Even I feel like I’ve been cutting back on Twitter lately… I just feel maybe that there isn’t as much point in updating it as there used to be…
Although my numbers are nowhere near the others, maybe it’s another one of those Internet fads that is nearing the end of it’s life cycle?
I saw a lesson on Twitter in the Indo today, that’s when I knew it has turned a corner – and I suddenly became less interested. But I still secretly love it. (not so secret now!)
very interesting post.
@raptureponies Oh noes! A lesson in the Indo!
We need to move somewhere else where there are no grownups.
I’m sorry, but I completely do not understand this.
You follow 400+ people, or approximately 2/3rds of the people who follow you. There is no obligation for you to follow all of those people, It’s YOUR Twitter stream; it should be streamlined to whatever is manageable and enjoyable to you.
Personally, I have a cap of 115. If I add someone new, I have to drop someone else. I can’t manage more.
I suspect – although you should tell me if I’m full of shite – that when you say culling your Twitter stream isn’t the solution, what you’re really saying is that it isn’t a solution you like. Those are not the same things.
Tweet that you’re dropping EVERYONE and rebuilding your list “over the next few days.” Then add back the 100 people who give you the most out of Twitter.
See if you like Twitter better when it’s really what YOU want, and not what you feel obligated to make it.
Hi Lexia
I’m a more recent adopter of Twitter, but old enough to remember the day…. no really I was on dial up bulletin boards before they were connected to each other to make the internet. I’m not trying to pull rank here… Just saying…(..I’m old).
But the excitement of Twitter and the learning curve, the finding out about all the things people could dream of doing with such a basic service; I have to say it was like watching what happened when Tim Bernas-Lee published the HTML specification.
He certainly didn’t see what was coming but thousands of people said; ‘oh, I get it; hyperlinks. Right, we can link words to other documents. Wow!’…and they were off.
This time I am just in time to see the S Fry and now J Ross et al, all porking up the stats. So what?
We I also see people asking how the hell Stephen Fry can manage his followers? Well in TV terms it is small…er…fry? He is just used to talking to that many people. But it be interesting to see how that all evolves. It is some kind of democracy at work, maybe we will have the first fat openly gay guy as president of England. i think more amazing thing have just happened in America. Wasn’t Twitter involved there too?
I’m saying I have learn as much from the medium, from learning the whole crazy asynchronous/random/surreal democratic reality of talking to hundreds of people around the world as well as from some of the fine twitter content(and dross).
I happened to be on line when the bombs went off in Mumbai and also just happened to have friends there. That was a mortifying few hours (It was at least half a day later that RTE had a mention) I won’t forget seeing phone camera shots of the wreckage and tweets from across the street as gunmen ran past.
When RTE did start running the reports it took me quite a while to realize it was the same event. The dry, jobsworth and censored tones. I know which reality I could believe.
So please recall what it was like for you at the start. When you first got your account. Those first few tweets. If it is boring for a while take a break but please come back.
All the best Dave
@Matt @Sabrina
I don’t know if that solves the problem
otherrather than staunch the bleeding… Have an open-mind, nonetheless.I recently took an eight day break from twitter and now that I’m back it’s boring. There was a time when I was passionate about the site and about the people. I could tweet seventy or more times a day, trying to get a discussion.
After the break though it feels old fashioned and meaningless. I’ve been trying other services and they have much more purpose. In particular I’m thinking of feedly and friendfeed as twitter replacements.
They’re part of the real time web. I follow what people are linking too and I see the comments, as they’re written. It self refreshes every few seconds and everything is well organised.
I can look at this blog post and see how many people have commented on it and add my thoughts, I don’t need to create a full new tweet to share that I like something. i press like and my friends see it.
It’s just so much more efficient that in a sense I would go that twitter is dead to me. In reality I think it’s simply lost a lot of it’s appeal now that the early adopters have stopped using it as a means by which to keep in touch with friends.