I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. On one hand, it’s a fascinating and valuable resource to discover news and content from a wide variety of people. On the other hand, it’s a distraction, a time-suck and a productivity killer.
As much as Twitter is a big part of my digital world, it’s a beast I try to manage so it works for me rather than against me. To keep things under control, here’s my approach to Twitter:
1. I use Twitter when it works for me. When I’m busy with work or personal stuff, I pretty much ignore Twitter and, to be honest, it’s not missed. In many ways, Twitter is like a parade: if you bend down to tie your shoe, you might miss several parade floats but there are dozens more coming down the road soon.
2. I don’t feel the need or desire to document my daily existence through tweets. I’m not sure many people care that I drink coffee, play hockey, visit certain places, go to different cities, or watch TV.
3. Twitter is not a personal toy. You may get a hint of what I do during non-works hours but it’s never going to be a full-disclosure medium. It never ceases to amaze me how many personal details people are happily willing to disclose via a steady flow of tweets.
4. Twitter’s real value for me is connections and access to content. The world is too busy and there’s too much content being created to keep up. I leave this grunt work to my followers who pick off the most interesting content, and then share it.
5. There’s no need to follow a lot of people. I have a little more than 300 followers, which provides a healthy enough and large enough collection of people. I’m not sure how anyone gets any value in following thousands of people: it’s like going to a humungous party in which you only manage to talk or listen to a few people. The party could have easily been 100 people as opposed to 1,000, and the experience would have been the same.
6. Twitter works for me, not the only way around. I don’t spend hours scouring tweets, looking for places to have conversations or adding new content. I’m always amazed to see people actively tweaking day and night. Being on Twitter this much would be mentally draining.
So, that’s it. The tao of Twitter, according to me.
I think it has to do with the whole autofollow thing why ppl amass so many followers. Also, it’s a courtesy thing. I often get frustrated following someone if they don’t follow me back. But hey, I’m pretty self-centered like that.
That pretty much sums up my feelings as well. I think it’s amusing how obsessed people are about the number of followers they have, who unfollowed them, even their ration of followers to following.
I like to use Twitter to connect with local people, colleagues, and web sites who I don’t necessarily want to follow via RSS. For those purposes, it works very well for me and I can check my Twitter feed at my convenience but never have to worry about being “caught up.”
Totally agree with you on all your points.
Something I have changed recently is that I am actually using Twitter search function more in order to connect to people who may have answers or experiences I am looking for.
For example – I have a person in my life suffering from Occipital Neuralgia. So instead of googling for information, I am actually searching for these terms on Twitter so that I can connect with people that are either doctors in this specialty, or people suffering from this condition so I can approach them about their methods for coping, medications, surgeries, etc.
This type of connection enables me to spark a conversation – which far more valuable to me than a bunch of informational search results from wikis and about.com