Comments on: Why I Unfollowed You

By: f055

f055 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:10:44 +0000

There’s a good point – filtering the firehose of messages (instant, twitter, whatever). That’s why I am hesitant to follow someone who has a lot of @replies – it’s easier to flood with them, legitimately, than with content messages. And I not mean on purpose, it’s just the effect of normal behavior, which some referred to when coming up with “Twitter is not a chat” thing.

Maybe semantics would help to auto-filter content, but that’s a matter of years…

By: James

James — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:04:22 +0000

That isn’t to say I’ve given up on Google, far from it, but with more subjective things, or questions I don’t know how to ask, advice or opinions, Twitter lets me get answers from people instead of machines.

I use Twhirl (but might jump to Tweetdeck for my main account) and one of the best features is that I can let the window sink below all my other applications, so I can control the noise level. I almost never visit Twitter’s site.

I’m not going to promote a specific tool, but maybe something with more filters would be easier to manage than the firehose of instant messages.

By: f055

f055 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:42:33 +0000

When I think of it, you are kind of right, but I’ve never tried to make Twitter something like a personal ask.com – but on the other hand it makes sense.

The way I see it may be a bit offset by the way I use Twitter – I’ve setup a link from Twitter to my GTalk with http://www.tweet.im and now I’m getting all update straight to Adium, like normal IM messages. So, what I’m interested in is getting some outside content, not going back to Twitter to read through @replies, because I want to minimize Twitter homepage necessity.

Then it stroke me people post a lot of rss-like content, inform about blog updates or new, interesting articles, and i get these way faster than through GReader. So I kind of shifted to making my followed list very content-rich. I can’t tell you this is a good approach, but I can’t agree with you that yours is the way to go, too

By: James

James — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:20:09 +0000

Listening to two other people talk may not have value to you, so ignore it. The beauty of ambient information is you don’t need to read everything. But if you only follow broadcasters, you’d lose the ability to say “Hey, does anyone know…?” and get a response.

With my little network, I can ask help from Flash experts, Linux experts, graphic designers, other developers, teachers, dads… and get a response. That’s the value of the community, and to me it’s worth more than the original content.

By: f055

f055 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:56:56 +0000

Hmm, good point. Maybe I am looking at Twitter too much like an instant RSS feed, rather than a new kind of IRC. But I’d really put a doubt in ‘value generated by the community’ coming from the @replies going back and forth – because how much % of that is really ‘value’?

By: James

James — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:50:32 +0000

I’ve never understood the complaint of getting half the conversation. The default setting is to only show you replies if you follow the person getting the reply. If yours is different, you can turn those off. (Settings > Notifications)

A little less than half my tweets are replies–comments, answers–according to TweetStats. I share things and produce some content (like this blog) but I’m mainly a consumer.

If you only want to follow broadcasters, you might be getting nearly 100% original content tweets, but you’ll lose a lot of the value generated by the community. Following replies has led me to new people to follow and helped me build relationships. Personally, I’d rather follow someone who only replies than someone who only posts “content.”

By: f055

f055 — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:22:25 +0000

I agree with all these points except #3. I unfollowed people because they were constantly replying, and pushing virtually no content tweets. I had no idea what they were talking about as most of the times I didn’t follow the person they were replying too. And frankly, it’s boring to dig through the ping-pong of replies, and they are often meaningless. So I stopped after trying once or twice.

When I see many @s in the timeline, I hesitate to follow too.

By: James

James — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:50:44 +0000

There’s a limited amount of “above the scroll” information, and the only part that’s consistent is the profile.

Don’t waste it.

By: Ken Burbary

Ken Burbary — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:01:26 +0000

Your #1 reason is one that I find most frustrating. If someone hasn’t taken the time to fill out their profile, they are making it extremely difficult for others to determine what they are all about. It only takes a few moments to add your website URL to the Twitter profile. Just. do. it.