(This was originally going to be two tweets - so much for that *LOL!*)
I returned to Twitter because I wanted to recommend it to friends and family as a way to maintain a web presence and social network that was easy to use. I had an account before but got bored and deleted it. (Besides, I’m used to maintaining a web presence regardless of its ease of use.) Some folks recently approached me about setting up ‘websites’ (that means so many different things) so I thought about recommending Twitter instead. It had been a while, so I created an anonymous account to scout out the features and followed people that interested me. My plan was for it to be a temporary thing; I wasn’t trying to establish permanent connections here with people I already knew.
I liked the changes I noticed. It’s easy to control what appears in your timeline - your home page at Twitter. Any user can send you a public reply unless you block (which I don’t hesitate to do if something seems fishy) and whether or not that reply appears on your timeline is up to you. (I highly recommend reading this FAQ for more information about reply settings.) You can also send and receive private direct messages.
I tweet because it’s fun and lightweight. My vintage laptop likes it much more than other social networking sites.
I don’t tweet for numbers. People like Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore have hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ and follow very few people themselves. I can’t relate.
I want to read what the people I follow tweet into my timeline, so I usually look for people who share similar interests. Sometimes that makes for interesting reading, but not always. I don’t follow someone to return the favor, but if someone follows me I’ll always take a preliminary look. I’m not trying to minimize the number of connections I make, but I am trying to maximize the relevance of and the communication between each of those connections. I’ve probably thought more about my process than the designers intended, but different people tweet differently. My timeline remains interesting to me and easy to manage because of the choices I make.
People I follow tend to:
- have interesting tweets about what they’re doing (or thinking)
- share my interests
- tweet moderately and sporadically, from their phones and from the web
- have full profiles and cute avatars
- be people I know
- have usernames that resemble their names
- also correspond with other people, whether or not they’re followers and whether or not it’s me
People I don’t follow tend to:
- primarily tweet about their jobs (even if they work for themselves)
- primarily tweet to link to their blogs
- be followed much more than they follow. I get the feeling they don’t actually read their timelines.
- tweet about getting more followers
- either have too many tweets or not enough tweets
- have incomplete (or non-existent) profiles
- only reply to other tweets
- wear bikinis in their avatars
People I block tend to:
- have one tweet with a link and do much more following than they are followed
- have usernames that seem automated (ending in a 4-digit year)
Some of these are hard and fast rules, some aren’t. Sometimes I’ve even gone completely random looking for people to follow, but that doesn’t really work. I’m trying to keep it interesting and fun, but there are no guarantees. As Twitter gains popularity, I predict that keeping my timeline interesting and fun will become more difficult. Like anything else, I’ll do it until I’m bored of it.




