Another week, another twittering of Tweets and other connective coincidences of the … oh, whatever you want to call it. Usual categories, usual possibly-useful items, usual ‘Read more…’ link:
I fear I’ve overdone it this week – almost twice as many as usual. Still, that’s what I collected as the week’s Tweets and links, so here y’is, y’all. Usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link.
Another week’s worth of Tweets and links – rather more than usual, this time. Same categories as usual, though, following the usual ‘More info…’ link:
It’s been quite a while since I wrote about my own policy on how I use Twitter.
In Twitter, many people aim to follow just about anyone who follows them. Quite a few people seem to think that this is a matter of etiquette, that it’s rude to not follow someone who follows you.
And yet here I am, a fairly ordinary, nothing-special kind of guy, with a fair few more than five hundred followers at last count, but only following rather than less than a hundred. In terms of those views about etiquette above, it might seem like I’m more than a bit rude to the Twitter community. So if my follow/not-follow seems unfair to you for that reason, I do apologise.
But it’s not about rudeness, I promise you – in fact it’s simply a matter of managing Twitter-overload. Let me explain.
As I understand it, many people just let the Twitter-stream go by: wash past them in a swirl of unending opinions and experiences. (If someone is following literally thousands of people on Twitter, I can’t see how they could do otherwise than let the stream wash past.) This would mean that the only option is to trust to serendipity: that the right Tweet, the meaningful Tweet, will somehow jump out of the stream, demanding attention at just the right moment.
I know that works for some people, perhaps many people, but it doesn’t work for me. Instead, I treat Twitter as my main business-intelligence tool. I assume that every Tweet is potentially meaningful – which means that I read every single Tweet that comes my way. I manually check just about every link presented in those Tweets. And I read probably at least half the articles linked-to in those Tweets – not just skim-read, but read carefully enough to make (I hope) useful comments on them.
In short, it’s a lot of work. As it is, it already occupies at least a couple of hours every day, and often more. That’s why I’m very careful about who I follow, because I have to – I don’t have any other choice, if I’m to stay sane and get any other work done in the day.
I’m an ‘aggregator’: I collect information, annotate it, and pass it on. I reTweet an average of about ten Tweets a day, sometimes more; many other Tweets that I receive (totalling more like thirty a day) will end up, often with extensive annotations, in my weekly ‘A week in Tweets’ blog-posts. That’s why I tend to restrict my ‘follows’ to those who are other ‘aggregators’ – people like Oscar Berg, Sinan Si Alhir, Craig Hepburn, Trevor Snaith and Pat Ferdinandi, to arbitrarily pick a few examples – yet who tend to post only a relatively small number of focussed Tweets. I also follow a few specific ‘thought-leaders’ in a much wider range of disciplines, but again, only those who post a relatively small number of Tweets.
I do believe I deliver a useful service in annotating all the Tweets that I reTweet or re-post. (Several people have told me this directly, which is kind of them.) Yet the only way I can do this is by keeping down to something manageable the numbers of Tweets that I have to deal with – which at the moment is around 150-200 Tweets a day. Hence the tight restriction on who I follow, and how many people I can follow.
The simplest annotations I do are the addition of specific hashtags. I’ll admit that a few of these may not be readily comprehensible to everyone, particularly:
My longer annotations always occur after the link (if any), and are preceded by a ‘<’ sign. Occasionally I’ll have to abbreviate or edit the original Tweet to make room, but otherwise I try to keep them intact. And wherever possible I try to include the Twitter-ID of the person who provided the original Tweet. (I notice that quite a few people don’t bother, but to me the attribution is an important point of professional etiquette, and also important for those who need to follow citation-trails in future.)
One other point: blocking. Like everyone, I receive quite a few ‘follow’-requests that are from spammers, time-wasters and people who are just trawling for auto-follows in the belief that quantity is more important than quality. (It isn’t. 
) I check every follow-request, and allow or block accordingly. There are also a few people whom – politely, I hope – I will block on the grounds that my work will be irrelevant for them: for example, someone from a building-supplies store who misunderstood the context of ‘architecture’ that I work in. In general, that check of the initial follow-request is the only time that I will block a potential ‘follow’. In fact I’ve only had one case where I had to block someone who’d been following me for quite a while – and that was because that person had become openly abusive to me and to others on my Tweetstream, and was frankly beyond a mere nuisance.
So that’s it. If I don’t follow you, it’s not because I don’t think that what you say is interesting – because it almost certainly is interesting. It’s just that I’ve found that this is the only way I can cope with the flood of information and still stay sane (or vaguely-sane, anyway… ). If there’s something that you think I should know about, please Tweet me direct as @tetradian – because, again, I do read every Tweet that I see.
Many thanks to all, anyway.
A bit late again – got a bit distracted. Never mind, here’s another week’s-worth of Tweets and links, sorted into the usual categories, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:
Another week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories, mostly: share and enjoy?
Finally catching up again: last week’s collection of Tweets and links. Usual categories unless otherwise noted.
More catchup on the backlog: another slightly-backdated list of Tweets and links. Usual categories, probably.
Oops… starting to slide back again. (My excuse was that I wanted all the Enterprise Canvas articles to appear together in the weblog, without the sequence being interrupted by any other articles.) Anyway, catching up, another week’s worth of Tweets and linked, sorted into the usual categories. Over to you: Share and Enjoy?