Twitter
and following back
Twitter is
a strange animal. It is easy to get in and out.
There is a wide variety of people, interests and
opinions in there. I cannot easily dismiss the
value of that diversity, and am tempted to follow
many for the only sake of better opening my human
horizon and spirit. Now, I know that Twitter is
assymetrical. We do not have to follow back each
other. Nevertheless, I quite value the richness of
experience that comes out of relations which are
not fully volatile, and by following back, I want
to increase the probability that it all
happens.
After
legitimate enthusiasm, I got a bit carried under
too much pollution of uninteresting tweets, and I
was torn between the desire of keeping links, and
not spending too much time at evaluating and
managing my Following list. Oh, I even hoped
that someone would write
TweeTabs, a Twitter reader meant to ease that
job, and even gave it a try myself. But even then,
I do not have so much time for developing that
project, so I needed some other, quicker
solution.
In view of
improving my Twitter experience (as they say
☺), I decided to manually clean up the list of
people I follow. Here are the few principles which
guided me for unfollowing:
- You indiscrimintaly follow tons of people. It
might mean that you are likely more interested in
statistics, or robots, than communication. If,
for one, I was following too many people, I would
merely drown you in the crowd. I'm not tempted to
follow people who do not hesitate to drown me in
their crowd; I just do not believe they have much
interest in me, if any. Your tweets may have an
absolute value in themselves, and they hint
towards who you are. I've more chance building up
with you on these hints if you see me.
- You are out tweeting for marketing purposes.
Your ads are usually intertwined
with empty proverbs, gratuitous citations, and
other pathetic tries to crank up some artificial
value to your verbiage, and create customership.
(On the other hand, you may well be an
exceptional marketer and be worth following
nevertheless!)
- You attempt to start futile quizzes, you
troll and tease all around for creating reactions
and Twitter activity, and even beg for retweets.
Get a life!
- You swear at every three words, or are
otherwise unwilling to write your own language
correctly. I do not enjoy deciphering a meaning
through tons of orthographical mistakes.
- You sent ten tweets in a row (or none at all)
when you initially subscribed half a year ago,
and stayed fully silent since then. Oh, I do not
expect you to tweet every day. All the contrary,
I even appreciate that you tweet less often,
given that when you do, you share more substance
than noise. However, there are lower limits to
sparseness.
Let's see
how fruitful these choices are going to be! ☺
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