what does Twitter actually mean to you?

Like so many of the cognoscenti, I've spent the last year or so grappling with Twitter. Yes, simply to understand what it does (and I'm still learning what you can accomplish with it) but more importantly to understand how I could usefully engage with it.

In other words, what the hell did Twitter mean to me?

In the interests of full disclosure, I set up an RSS feed a couple of years ago, and shut it down that same morning. I watched content I'd identified as being interesting to me pile up in the reader, link after link after link, and the sense of obligation I felt was so overwhelming that it caused me serious anxiety. I already have an inbox; I don't need another one. Yes, I know there is no actual obligation, but lists aren't something I like to have hanging over me. And that's what RSS felt like.

So I know that I have a certain way of apprehending information, a way that I need to engage with it. That's not going to change, no matter what the application is called.

Anyway, getting involved with Twitter I dutifully followed people who were interesting, especially lots of marketing people whose wisdom I needed to, um, learn from. Except I didn't expect the explosion in my feed – I couldn't keep up. After a few weeks I purged the people whose only tweets were retweets or links to their blog content (if I was interested, I'd bookmark the damn blog) or who tweeted so insanely often that I began to doubt that they were actually professionally employed (sorry, Jeff Blair) not so much because of their content but because they were drowning out the tweeting of other voices I wanted to hear.

Twitter started feeling like a big-ass RSS feed.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of marketing people seem to go to the same conferences and naturally be excited about the same interesting things at the same time.

This is understandable and hey, it is after all about something interesting. But when you see five or six people tweet or retweet something within minutes of each other, for me the impression of a herd mentality is so strong that I balk. If everyone's excited, my natural tendency is to be skeptical.

So, for those reasons I felt compelled to edit many of people I was following, and many marketing folks. I've discovered that I need a breadth of voices of Twitter, even within this marketing thing of ours, so that I'm consistently being exposed to as much as possible.

Ebert is a machine, as is Bruce Arthur, but they don't drown out Douma, Nick Kristof, Lousie Clements, Ann Handley, Steveoftheweb or Jinnean Barnard.

Following fewer voices with more interesting perspectives, as opposed to following everyone I've ever clicked on, has been very useful for me.

Comments

[JBarnard]

I haven't been keeping up! Thank you kindly for the mention.