Twoubles with Twitter
May 7th, 2009, 12:39am by JakeThe Twitter phenomena has now reached new levels of craziness, with Ashton getting 1 million “followers” and Oprah and dozens of other celebrities (follow @carolina to see regular updates on famous people on Twitter). But as it scales, it gets harder to take advantage of the seemingly new utility without friends’ updates getting lost in sea of tweets. For example, I now follow just over 100 people & I’m constantly pruning the list. That’s almost too much. At the same time, I’ve stopped following many people that interest me b/c they tweet too much or just don’t add enough value. Yet I’d like to keep an eye on these users, and be able to search or scan their updates quickly to see what the top topics are.
There are tools out there that will do this (Tweetdeck is frequently mentioned), and there’s also the possibility of multiple accounts. But that seems so inelegant, and ultimately frustrating. For example, if I come to rely on Tweetdeck, what happens if I’m surfing from a friend’s computer or on my cell phone? That’s just one pet peeve. I think Twitter could alleviate this issue by allowing users to create groups or lists of people to categorize them. What does everyone else think are the big Twitter shortcomings? How can the service become better, and how can we use it more effectively?
May 7th, 2009 at 6:51 am
It probably comes down to how you use twitter — Jake, you use it much differently than I do, communicating with many more people and using it to promote web pages and such. So you kinda need lots of followers. I don’t really know a way to make that work easily — twitter never imagined they’d be this successful, or that people would use it this way, I guess. At one point I tried TweetDeck just for the hell of it, and didn’t like it at all. Dividing people into groups may help some, but it has to be on Twitter’s end if it’s going to be viable.
Personally, I have 2 accounts, one for following and chatting with friends, and one that I don’t post to, but use just for following the high-volume twitterers that I don’t know. That’s the one I use to follow local stores, Boston events, tech bloggers, etc. I decided that I care when my friends twitter, but others were low priority, and if I miss a tweet from those low priority people, who cares., no big deal. I don’t want all that crap in the same stream as my friends, and grouping them into different accounts makes it easy to ignore. This is the only way that really works for me, and isn’t so weird to me since I do the same with email (different accounts) and RSS feeds (folders to group feeds by priority).
Jake, you were going to try something like that a while back when you set up another account, what happened to that?
May 10th, 2009 at 11:15 am
It terms of two way communication, I pretty much use Twitter to talk to you guys.
I also follow a few organizations (like the Giants) and a few celebrities for the fun of it, but only if it’s not disruptive enough to bother me throughout the day. Honestly, 100 followers and followees seems totally overwhelming.
For you, Jake, it seems to me that the ability to organize followees between those that notify by SMS and those that require you to have the time to visit the webpage offers you the most important type of “grouping.” You lose that ability once you have an always available Twitter client, unfortunately.
May 10th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Yeah, getting texts when you guys tweet is a big help. I think i Twitterfox let me create groups, it would solve the problem for now. But until Twitter implements groups, I’ve pretty much maxed out the number of people I can follow.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
So why not set up another account? Twitterfox allows you to switch between multiple accounts easily. Essentially, it seems that that’s how Twitter wants users to implement groups, at least for now.
May 13th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Twitter down! Twitter down! What will we do?
8 hours until lost…