After over 1,000 updates on Twitter, I said goodbye to the site last December. Too much noise, not enough signal. From Goodbye Twitter:
I’m sorry, but I don’t care what you had to eat. Or that you just arrived to the office. Or that you are meeting with a vendor. And forgive me if I don’t want to see some crappy photo you just took from your cell phone.
I suppose one could always UNFOLLOW a friend with tedious posts. But that action is very public and could lead to hurt feelings. Most of my friends are very interesting – if you give them more than 140 characters. Almost none of them are at 140 or less.
And:
Maybe I’ll change my mind someday. Anything is possible. But for now, it is too much noise and I’m turning it off. Goodbye Twitter.
Well, I changed my mind and I’m back on Twitter. Well kinda.
I discovered a lot of people use Twitter instead of RSS Readers to be updated when new content appears on their favorite blogs. It would be foolish to have a blog without an RSS feed. As much as it pains me, Twitter is becoming an RSS feed replacement for many on the Internet. If you can’t beat em…
Fortunately for me and my sanity, I found a WordPress plugin that automatically posts a link to each new blog entry on Twitter. It is called Feed2Tweet. I set one up for MAS o Menos and Coffee Hero. I also setup a DeepFitness account on Twitter. How that gets used is still to be determined.
Twitter Accounts:
- digitalcolony – For this blog.
- coffeehero – For the Coffee Hero blog.
- ineedcoffee – May use to highlight 10 years of content.
- deepfitness – To be determined
Several years ago I went to the Street Scene music festival back when it was actually in downtown San Diego. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of people went to this event. It was crowded. During a performance by Blues Traveler, the lead singer started talking toward some guy sitting on the balcony of a building outside the festival. This guy was just sitting on a chair enjoying the show. He had a perfect view of the show and he didn’t have to buy a ticket or pay for parking. He had access to his own food and drink. If he got bored with the show, he didn’t need to fight his way out of the event, he could just go inside his condo.
If it appears I’m not paying attention to your Tweets, it is because I’m the guy on the balcony, not the guy in front of the stage. 
You can unfollow me anytime, no hurt feelings. I bore even myself in under 140 characters. Many times, in more than 140 characters.
I follow you on Facebook. FB is like a nice house party. Twitter is like a drunken riot.
I’ll do a post on this, but FB provides good (not great) filtering tools. The only filtering tool on Twitter is Unfollow.
I think it was a really good idea to create a DF Twitter account. We should also make a DF FB page / group. If we move DF to WP there are, as you know, some good automated plugins. Let’s talk.
I heard a cool segment on NPR recently about a brain researcher who mentally wrote and sent a twitter message recently. He put electrodes on his head and then concentrated really hard on the letters he wanted to type one at a time.
The immediate implication is that it would be great for people with disabilities who cannot otherwise communicate. I thought it was cool though, mainly because it was the first time I had heard of anyone interacting non-physically with their environment.
Jim -
I went looking for that NPR story and stumbled across this funny segment on Twitter.
“Its like stalking someone without the inconvenience of sitting in a car outside their house on a cold rainy night with a loaded gun in your lap.”
Use a client like TweetDeck to filter tweets. Its “groups” feature works for me.
Facebook not only offers filtering by person or group, but you can block certain applications. So when I first see some dumb quiz, I block it once and never shows up on my home page again.
If Twitter was smart enough to block by subject (sports comes to mind), that would be a huge step in the right direction.
“FB is like a nice house party. Twitter is like a drunken riot.” From my limited experience with the two sites, it seems like this is by design. FB is more for family and friends type following and twitter seems much broader. I can definitely see the value in twitter and believe that it will soon be used for business research. I sent you this link earlier, the “sentiment” calculation is very interesting: http://www.twendz.com
Twitter has effectively delegated the filtering to the client which has pro’s and cons.
For example, TweetDeck has great filtering, but it is local to the client and the client isn’t in the cloud. So my filtering isn’t portable.
A cloud-based TweetDeck would be groovy. Who knows, maybe it already exists?
[...] I’ve abandoned Twitter for being a waste of time only to surface on Facebook and then back on Twitter. When I stopped reading political news, I became a financial news junkie. The distractions [...]