More Twitter Hating
Seriously, I’m not going to be able to join polite company with anyone who works there, am I?
I figure that the only way to use Twitter effectively is to post messages at a time of day when everyone will get it one way or another via all the third party updaters out there, and when it won’t get drowned out by all the chatty people. Therefore, If you have anything to say that you want people to read, post it on Twitter at 7am. If you just like hearing yourself talk, and myself + the rest of planet Earth is coincidental to your mission to say things out loud, then by all means continue posting stuff any hour of the day.
As previously announced, I turned off SMS Twitter updates. I get direct messages but no one’s feeds or reblogs. I do have an iPhone with Twinkle, and that makes up for it, but I don’t get push updates and I miss a LOT of stuff this way.
I noticed tonight that, looking at Twitter via its own website, I get just the last 20 updates and no more than that. Of those 20 updates, three people are doing most of the talking because they habitually abuse Twitter. One friend sits at home afterwork and reblogs a half-dozen people at a time, none of whom were speaking to him in the first place; several users use Twitter as a blog and post multiple/long updates in consecutive status updates.
I can’t stop the overusers/abusers without unsubscribing (which would be IRL socially awkward) and during busy hours I can’t scroll back to see what I missed more than an hour ago. Part of the problem is that even if I use a client that archives incoming tweets, during the day the home computer goes into hibernate mode as it should and doesn’t suck down power while collecting 140-char status updates throughout the day.
If I saw one most recent post from each of the 20 most-recently-updated users, that might help the problem substantially. Yet overall there is something entirely broken with this system and I can only hope that the marketplace forces at least one microblogging provider to get on top of things.
