Do we talk on Twitter?
March 6, 2008 //
Clearing the mound of paperwork after my recent travels is a great start to the working day. My next port of call was Twitter, to find out what had been happening around the world today. You see, Twitter isn’t just a one-way broadcast tool to tell people where you are and what you’re doing.
These days, Twitter is used for micro blogging, reporting news, spreading gossip and soliciting opinion from trusted friends. In fact, Twitter (well, my Twitter friends) has replaced my search engine whenever I’m looking for a recommendation or advice on something. For example, I’m currently conducting research on social networks for mobile users. Rather than spend ages searching on the Web, I decided to ask my Twitter friends. Within minutes I had at least ten people recommend two sites on average. Today I received some good recommendations about my upcoming trip to New York as I need to find reasonable accommodation in Manhattan.
So, before I started reading through the Twitter conversations, I decided to unfollow lots of people. If I didn’t immediately recognise the name, I unfollowed them. This might appear to be unfriendly and I suppose to a degree it is. But I want to increase the quality of the noise that’s coming through whilst making sure I’m not putting up barriers to potential relationships that could prove fruitful in the future.
I’d never intentionally unfollow someone with whom I’ve had a conversation, so please let me know if I’ve unfollowed you when I shouldn’t have. Even if we haven’t conversed but you’d like to know if I follow you, just send me a direct message from Twitter. If you’re not able to DM me, it means I’m not following you. If you continue to care, please let me know and I’ll happily follow you.
As a matter of interest, I follow some people who don’t follow me. But that’s ok, I’m interested in what they have to say and perhaps some day, they’ll have a mutual interest in what I have to say. Perhaps I just have something to say too often 
I’m interested in what you have to say about Twitter. I’m also interested in your thoughts about my use of it. Do I talk too much?
Andy Oakes says 
James Pearce says 
Joe Scanlon says 
There is plenty of it going on. Unfollowing is the new following."I have lots of friends" is becoming " I’m too busy to be interested in what you are doing"
Has the wildfire started to move on from Twitter?
March 6th, 2008
My Twitter peeve is people who blog a LOT and use their Twitter as a duplicate RSS feed/promo megaphone.
You don’t talk too much, no.
I worry a lot about my Twitter output, but so far I don’t know of any unfollows due to volume. I unfollowed a bunch of people who were having 100+ tweet conversations about the US elections, and will re-add them after that is all over (after the court cases, etc ;)). I’m going to unfollow a LOT of people during SXSW, simply because it’s going to be far too much irrelevant information - coordinating meet-ups, schedules, panel live-blogging, etc - that I don’t have the patience to page through. I’ll re-add most, if not all, after SXSW is over.
I think we’re all still sussing Twitter out, seeing what works for us and what doesn’t. All but the most chip-shouldered seem pretty sanguine about this process. Or maybe I just follow all the lovely people…
March 6th, 2008
You’re pretty high volume but I’m fairly interested in most of what you say; has to be said that you’re on the borders of "unfollow but take RSS feed"
Presumably you take google alerts or (my preference) a terraminds RSS for yourself (http://terraminds.com/twitter/update-rss?query=PaulWalsh&) so you can see anything you’re missing?
I tend to unfollow those who never do @ replies (they’re not engaging) but if all they do is @ that’s no fun either.
See @psd’s <a href="http://blog.whatfettle.com/2008/01/05/are-you-a-twitter-twit-or-a-twerp/">thoughts</a> on the matter.
Every now and then I use twitterkarma, and if I’m following someone who doesn’t follow me and they haven’t posted much of interest, I’ll unfollow.
March 6th, 2008
You link too much! Five times in that post you link back to yourself (your blogs Twitter category) off the same word.
Why?
Surely actually linking to Twitter or yourself on Twitter would have been more useful?
March 6th, 2008
@James - I certainly hope I don’t give that impression. I couldn’t listen to all of my followers as the people with whom I converse wouldn’t never been highlighted to me. Some are happy to be listeners.
March 6th, 2008
@elly, the link doesn’t link back to myself. Twitter is one of the tags I used. So if you click on the link, you’ll get every post I wrote which is associated to that tag.
I simply forgot to link the first mention of Twitter to twitter.com - which is what I’d normally do.
I’m not one for inbound links, you should know that. I always link out. I didn’t in this post because I would have spent my morning linking to all the people to whom I refer in my post.
March 6th, 2008
I forsee a trend in alter-egos and Twitter profiles. (all handled elegantly by multi-profile clients of course) e.g JamesTheVerbose, JamesTheListener, JamesTheProfessional, JamesTheBored etc etc
Then people can follow me (and v.v.) as appropriate to the interest.
March 6th, 2008
… the blog automatically links every mention of the tag. It’s a bit like having the tags specified at the top or bottom of each post. I don’t use Technorati tags because I don’t believe in it usefulness.
March 6th, 2008
And why do my linebreaks get collapsed? Am I a PaulFWalsh formatting outcast now I use a MBA?
March 6th, 2008
@James - yeah it’s a bit like having a few blogs. The problem is keeping them up to date and informing each interested party of the relevance of each. In fact, I decoupled my blog because people were loosing sight of what Segala was - i.e. I was talking about everything but the interests of the company.
March 6th, 2008
@James - what browser are you using? I’ll look into your formatting issues. I’ve edited your comments so they look a little more like what you had intended. I hope
@Jackie - perhaps if Twitter added a channel for very specific events like Qik did for us at 3GSM. Then people wouldn’t feel the need to twitter what they’re doing/saying so much… BTW I’ve had at least one person unfollow me because of the Qik specific noise level - I don’t bother to search for this stuff - he went out of his way to tell me and everyone else.
@Steve "you’re on the borders of "unfollow but take RSS feed" lol that’s my favourite quote of the day, thanks. Regarding the string for my RSS Reader; thank you so much. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. I’ve since added it. Twitter does display people I don’t follow, but who use @paulwalsh - I end up following them 99% of the time out of respect.
I agree with people who continiously do @ PaulWalsh. I remind them how to do it properly
March 6th, 2008
"… the blog automatically links every mention of the tag. It’s a bit like having the tags specified at the top or bottom of each post."
So how come only some mentions of the word Twitter (6 out of
are "tagged" and not others? Either it was done manually or the automatic function was not working properly…
March 6th, 2008
@elly - good point. I’ll ask Kamrul to take a look at it right now. Thanks.
March 6th, 2008
If someone were to tell me why they unfollowed me, I could classify it as valuable ‘customer’ feedback…unless they’re a prat, in which case I can classify it as amusing drivel.
I unfollowed @davewiner because he was really hammering Twitter with one-line tweets about the election. A quarter of the tweets I was having to page through were his. Too much noise (it didn’t help that his views were so barmy). But he shouldn’t necessarily care about that, and I didn’t want him to think I was making a show of it, so just quietly unfollowed.
March 6th, 2008
@Jackie - yeah, it was useful feedback as you can’t please everyone all of the time. I upset Winer with my comment to him about his election tweets - I wanted him to know that most people don’t want to hear his political views on Twitter.
March 6th, 2008
@elly
the auto tag feature is completely automated here, I can assure you that.
The problem was the posts (which are way older than this blog, but off course written by Paul) imported from Segala blog was not tagged and queried for re- discovery of tags. Thanks for noticing it, it has been resolved.
March 6th, 2008
Funny thing is that Winer is one of those Yanks who whinges about "America’s image" around the world, but has no idea that it’s the actions of individual Americans like him that really affect (connected, opinionated) people and hack them off. He’s interesting with tech but I’m not THAT morbidly fascinated by his fresher’s view of how the world should be run that I wanna read 3k tweets a day about it.
Speaking of which, time for me to hush.
March 6th, 2008
@Jackie - spot on!
March 6th, 2008
Dude,
Started following you after only seeing one half of Josie Fraser’s tweets in your direction… Like what you say, you’re not too noisy… It’s all good.
Not sure I can say the same about myself however…
March 8th, 2008