3 things that confuse me about twitter

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So I visited friendorfollow.com to catch up on those nice folks who are following me on Twitter but who I don’t currently follow. Boy it really feels like a “job” when I do this (who are they, where are they, what do they do, do they say anything interesting etc.) and yet I force myself to because there are people who I do want to follow on that list and just never got around to it.

I’m not an immediate follower of people who follow me. Mostly because of time and also because some people’s tweets don’t interest me. Hey, there are lots of people who I follow who don’t follow me so it works both ways and it ain’t personal, either way.

But going through this exercise yet again, I thought about these three things in no particular order:

• Who has the time to try and follow thousands of people and then make any sense of it while having a professional and personal life?
• Why don’t some people put up a picture in their profile? If you have that stupid twitter bird for your picture, I can’t be bothered with you…sorry, it’s a “thing” with me
• What’s the deal with people who block their tweets? If you need to hide anything from Twitter (and its cool if you do) you shouldn’t be on Twitter

What about you? Agree? Disagree? Do you have other pet Twitter peeves?

2 Responses to “3 things that confuse me about twitter”

  1. Great topic, Peter. I’ll start with my “peeve”. When I see someone has, let’s say, 17,647 followers and is following about that many, I don’t know that I will ever follow them. Or those sites that say “get more Twitter followers”. I’m not in a contest with this thing. I’ve heard the news media speak of a video on YouTube as having been viewed 1 million times, and I understand that milestone, but the idea of “trying” to get as many followers as you can, that irks me a bit.

    Other thoughts:

    I block “followers” sometimes…I’m not interested in spammers or porno folks following me.

    I don’t follow everyone, or most, who follow me. I certainly hope I’m not trampling good Twitter manners under foot. I’m shocked anyone would follow me in the first place and not sure why they do. I never follow for the sake of following. I read every tweet and, thus I follow only a relatively small number of folks.

    Also, I personally try to follow a self-imposed 80/10/10 rule, whereby 80% of my tweets are in direct response to Twitter’s question of: “What are you doing?”. Then 10% is committed to offering, hopefully, helpful information to those who follow and then the final approx. 10% is fun/friendly interactions.

  2. Hi Brian:

    I think for some people, garnering followers will always be a priority on line; my theory for that is because they’ve have less success with that task in real life – again, just a theory.

    And you know I had my first porno follower the other day. Sent me an @ message, couldn’t tell anything was amiss from the name, I clicked on it and dove for the delete key when the screen popped up. And then I promptly laughed heartily.

    Most fascinating in your response is how you’ve created a disciplined tweet equation. I’m not quite there yet – my rule is to stay out of conversations with folks I don’t really know. But I like the way you think.

    Best always,
    – Peter