About three years ago, I was told in a university workshop to join Twitter. I did and I didn’t really get the point of it. I registered with the rather unimaginative username of @DavidMooney, which is, coincidentally, almost exactly the same as my real name. In fact, the only character that’s different is that I have a space between the lowercase d and uppercase M.
Anyway, I followed the person sitting next to me. I followed my flatmate. I followed my friends. I followed everybody I was on the course with. I followed my tutors. And we all spent the first few weeks posting messages about not getting it and not understanding the point of it. Then we were told it would be an idea to follow some other people; people that we didn’t know. People that posted messages about what was happening in the world, or, in other words, journalists and citizen journalists.
For a long while, I never bothered to update. But then I started to build up followers as I posted messages, mainly about rubbish, but occasionally about current affairs and having conversations about things that were going on. In fact, I’ve found I update a lot more since buying a smartphone, because I could update on the move, rather than having to text an update to a number and not be able to see the responses until hours later.
Soon, I began to get it. News travels quicker on Twitter than anywhere else. Images and video, too. Not only can you play silly games, but you can discuss important worldly issues with other users, and find out what is going on around the world at the click of a button. Think what happened in Egypt, earlier this year.
Then, I started the BlueMoon Podcast. A few City fans who listened began to follow me and then I began to encourage listeners to follow me (and the official account – clicky) to get more interactivity in the show: answers to audience questions, the occasional competition, letting people know the show actually exists.
And with all this came the occasional mention on the #FollowFriday hashtag. For the non-Twitterers amongst you, this is essentially a follow recommendation from one tweeter about another. On a Friday. And it started out as a great idea: It began as a 140 character plug for somebody you followed, a quick “here’s a person I find writes interesting things, so you might find they write interesting things to”, which worked for the most part.
At the time of writing, I follow 279 people and, a lot of the time, I struggle to keep up with the number of tweets in my timeline. If I haven’t logged in and read them for an hour or so, I tend to not read them, jumping straight to direct messages and @mentions to see if I’ve had any meant purposefully for me. So, when reading my timeline, I would click a user who had been given a #FollowFriday mention and consider following based on their recent tweets.
But it’s now become a pointless chore that makes Twitter almost unusable on a Friday. Singling one user out that you follow as a suggestion for others makes sense – the people that do follow you and receive your tweets can evaluate for themselves. But recently, far too many tweeters are mentioning ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty users that they follow. They post four or five tweets with a list of users as suggestions of people to follow.
And that makes no sense.
Struggling to keep up with tweets already, I’m not going to click on each user in the list and browse their recent posts to see if I’d like to follow them. I’d have to do that twenty times before I’d finished with just one list; if all of the 279 people that I follow did it, my timeline would be an unreadable list of usernames and the #FollowFriday hashtag. I’m far too lazy to search through every single one.
For what that’s worth, it’d probably be easier just to tweet the message “#FollowFriday – everybody that I follow.” Then at least it could be ignored and timely messages about anything else wouldn’t get caught up in a long list of @mentions.
I very rarely do #FollowFriday mentions, these days, simply for that reason. As a tweeter, you should follow people that you find interesting or that you want to hear from; you shouldn’t follow people simply because they follow you. What’s the point? If you follow me simply because I follow you, then you’re going to ignore my messages and that defeats the whole purpose of Twitter. Not following me in return won’t make me any less interested in what you have to say.
As for #FollowFriday, the only time you’ll get more than one from me in any tweet is a week when the BlueMoon Podcast is released. Then you’ll get everybody who is in that episode. Other weeks, if I give somebody a #FollowFriday mention, then I’ll fill up the rest of the tweet with a quick explanation.
Not a list of other users.
Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Twitter | Technorati
Advertisement
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
~ by David Mooney on March 24, 2011.
Posted in Comment, Current Affairs, News, Technology
Why Twitter Is Unusable On A Friday
Anyway, I followed the person sitting next to me. I followed my flatmate. I followed my friends. I followed everybody I was on the course with. I followed my tutors. And we all spent the first few weeks posting messages about not getting it and not understanding the point of it. Then we were told it would be an idea to follow some other people; people that we didn’t know. People that posted messages about what was happening in the world, or, in other words, journalists and citizen journalists.
For a long while, I never bothered to update. But then I started to build up followers as I posted messages, mainly about rubbish, but occasionally about current affairs and having conversations about things that were going on. In fact, I’ve found I update a lot more since buying a smartphone, because I could update on the move, rather than having to text an update to a number and not be able to see the responses until hours later.
Soon, I began to get it. News travels quicker on Twitter than anywhere else. Images and video, too. Not only can you play silly games, but you can discuss important worldly issues with other users, and find out what is going on around the world at the click of a button. Think what happened in Egypt, earlier this year.
Then, I started the BlueMoon Podcast. A few City fans who listened began to follow me and then I began to encourage listeners to follow me (and the official account – clicky) to get more interactivity in the show: answers to audience questions, the occasional competition, letting people know the show actually exists.
And with all this came the occasional mention on the #FollowFriday hashtag. For the non-Twitterers amongst you, this is essentially a follow recommendation from one tweeter about another. On a Friday. And it started out as a great idea: It began as a 140 character plug for somebody you followed, a quick “here’s a person I find writes interesting things, so you might find they write interesting things to”, which worked for the most part.
At the time of writing, I follow 279 people and, a lot of the time, I struggle to keep up with the number of tweets in my timeline. If I haven’t logged in and read them for an hour or so, I tend to not read them, jumping straight to direct messages and @mentions to see if I’ve had any meant purposefully for me. So, when reading my timeline, I would click a user who had been given a #FollowFriday mention and consider following based on their recent tweets.
But it’s now become a pointless chore that makes Twitter almost unusable on a Friday. Singling one user out that you follow as a suggestion for others makes sense – the people that do follow you and receive your tweets can evaluate for themselves. But recently, far too many tweeters are mentioning ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty users that they follow. They post four or five tweets with a list of users as suggestions of people to follow.
And that makes no sense.
Struggling to keep up with tweets already, I’m not going to click on each user in the list and browse their recent posts to see if I’d like to follow them. I’d have to do that twenty times before I’d finished with just one list; if all of the 279 people that I follow did it, my timeline would be an unreadable list of usernames and the #FollowFriday hashtag. I’m far too lazy to search through every single one.
For what that’s worth, it’d probably be easier just to tweet the message “#FollowFriday – everybody that I follow.” Then at least it could be ignored and timely messages about anything else wouldn’t get caught up in a long list of @mentions.
I very rarely do #FollowFriday mentions, these days, simply for that reason. As a tweeter, you should follow people that you find interesting or that you want to hear from; you shouldn’t follow people simply because they follow you. What’s the point? If you follow me simply because I follow you, then you’re going to ignore my messages and that defeats the whole purpose of Twitter. Not following me in return won’t make me any less interested in what you have to say.
As for #FollowFriday, the only time you’ll get more than one from me in any tweet is a week when the BlueMoon Podcast is released. Then you’ll get everybody who is in that episode. Other weeks, if I give somebody a #FollowFriday mention, then I’ll fill up the rest of the tweet with a quick explanation.
Not a list of other users.
Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Twitter | Technorati
Share this:
Like this:
~ by David Mooney on March 24, 2011.
Posted in Comment, Current Affairs, News, Technology