While I’m as much about “information like water” as the next person– I don’t get myself worked up trying to keep up with every Twitter or blog post from people I follow or subscribe to– my online habits put a natural cap on the number of people that it makes sense to follow. Over the last few weeks I’ve found a need to cut back a bit on the volume so the good stuff doesn’t get lost. In doing so I’ve stumbled across a few personal principals for following (and not following) people.
I don’t have a magic number that I can follow (if I did, it would probably be something a little insane, like D’Arcy’s 62 so that the avatar grid on his Twitter page is even). I also tend to take the online conversations a bit more personally– even in an informal place like Twitter– so Jen’s approach is a bit too flippant (too informal? I’m not trying to be negative, it just isn’t a good method for my personality) and drastic for me.
If you don’t follow me, I will probably drop you. There are exceptions– a very few people I follow just because they are so funny or informative (in a non-personalized way)– but like the group conversation I always liken Twitter to, I will only sit and make googly eyes for so long before moving on. If my conversation isn’t interesting enough for you to follow, then you better be really interesting or I better really be hoping you will eventually follow me. Otherwise, *snip*.
If you talk too much then for purely practical reasons I’ll probably stop following you. This mostly happens with people who consistently deluge my Twitter-stream with scores of chat-like posts, usually to the same person or three. I do subscribe to a number of loud talkers via their RSS feed. However,
If you don’t talk enough I’ll probably drop you as well. If you have a history of interesting, but rare, Tweets I’ll probably add you to my RSS reader. This is also partially pragmatic: those who don’t Tweet enough tend to get lost in the stream of information anyway. A corollary:
If you are using Twitter for advertising, product announcements, etc., then use it! If you only Twitter once every 3-12 weeks to tell me about something new with your product, then don’t bother. That’s why you have your web site and mailing lists and other mechanisms in place for customer service.
I have no use for locking or blocking… yet. I haven’t found a compelling reason to block anyone yet. If you want to follow thousands of people and I am one of them, that’s OK with me. I don’t understand it, but I don’t care any more than I care that many people subscribe to my blog feeds (and for all I know, Twitter feeds too) that I don’t know. Of course, if I protected my updates that would be different. But on that, my position hasn’t really changed: I don’t see that locking provides enough benefit to outweigh the downsides for how I use (and want others to use) the system.
I completely agree that the approach is personal and one won’t work for everyone. I disagree that my approach was flippant. In fact, I decided on that approach out of respect for those with whom I converse the most. I would have preferred not to have dropped everyone, but there was no practical way to sort through more than 300 people. As soon as I dropped everyone, I added back 25-30 or so of my most frequent connections. From there, I added the people with whom they conversed. I am now following 75 and have met several new people I feel will contribute to my experience. While my approach was lighthearted, I certainly don’t think it was disrespectful. Considering I used as formal data as I could find to add my contacts back, I wouldn’t say it was informal either.
Disagreement is OK. For me, dropping everyone I followed at once without some criteria is flippant. FOR ME.
Using the random conversation points that happen to emerge between contacts is a fine way to go about adding people back… in fact probably among the best and most natural ways to grow a network. I suspect that many people use the basics of that part of your method without thinking about it. But that doesn’t make it “formal” in my opinion… nor should it be! Twitter isn’t about formality.
I wouldn’t describe Jen’s pruning as flippant at all. She said before beginning the process that she wanted to experiment with rebooting her social network, and rebuilding it through a more thoughtful/directed approach rather than the current quasi-random accretion method. The only reason she had to drop everyone is because Twitter doesn’t provide any robust methods to manage contacts (just add/drop - tools like TwitterKarma and TweetClouds help but a full deletion reboot is the only way to start fresh).
Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of the experiment. I’ve seriously thought about nuking my accounts on several services and starting fresh, but Jen took a less drastic approach.
I look forward to the results too– it seems to me that she is explicitly doing what most people do, at least in part, to grow their networks– following on the leads provided by the few trusted “seeds.”
As for it being flippant– I wish people would read what I’ve written– TWICE now– about that. I said that *I* take Twitter conversations more personally and that Jen’s method is flippant from MY perspective. I don’t like informal as a descriptor because while true, that’s a valid way for ME to operate. I consider dropping everyone I follow, whether in pursuit of an experiment or not, to be a flippant treatment of community. Which is why, at this point, I wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t mean that for SOMEONE ELSE it isn’t.
I’m not particularly surprised that you jumped gallantly to Jen’s defense, though, even if the slight is misperceived
Flippant was probably a poor word choice, but then you knew that, hence the parenthetical. Not sure why anyone would take you to task when the disclaimer was so clear.