As some of my readers will know, I have a bit of an issue with lengthy Twitter conversations between users. Anything over three replies between two people is just showing that the users don’t understand the medium, in my eyes. Small converstaions of one or two replies are absolutely fine, and often very interesting, but if two people alone find they’re “chatting” on an open channel, it’s just yawnsome.
Also Tweet frequency; if someone is posting more than say five an hour (I don’t really have an exact figure, it’s what feels right or more importantly, wrong) then I get irritated by their dominance on my Twitter feed and tend to un-follow them. To give you an idea, I’ve unfollowed at least five people I can think of who at one point or other were posting up to 20 Tweets an hour. That’s just a flagrant disregard for their followers time and social space online, I’d say.
And finally, this is also true of anyone who *only* uses Twitter as a chat program, ie all their Twitters are @someone. It’s just boring, I’m interested in what people are up to, and the occassional questions, comments and thoughts that pop up.
I’m aware that I’m quite militant about my views on Twitter, in the same way that I will only connect on LinkedIn with people I have actually worked with and would recommend, and the way I culled my Facebook “friends” that weren’t friends. But I’ve found that the value of my social network for me is all about the quality, not the quantity. I predict this will also start to become a more widespread view as people’s networks grow and grow through evolving social media.
All my views aside though, this post, “Thinking about capillary conversations and choice” is a brilliant beginners through to advanced users guide on how to microblog, it is based on Twitter but I would suggest it is well worth rolling out across all microblogging platforms.
Thayer Prime's Blog 
Twitterhoea – Horses for Courses
Ah, I do like a good Thayer-related rant.
But this is looking at Twitter from your perspective – one, to which if I’m honest, is very close to my own. But then we’re overwhelmed with communications via IM, Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, etc, etc.
Maybe we’ll see people registering a number of Twitter feeds, some for personal conversations, some for micro-blogging, some for corporate instead of the one stream-fits-all approach that’s the current vogue.
For my part, I’m gonna be there being typically canterkerous about all this stuff, playing with it nonetheless.
Damm, should’ve had this conversation via Twitter 😉
Re: Twitterhoea – Horses for Courses
Funnily enough, I’ve had 3 replies via Twitter to this post – not actually commenting on the blog itself, which is a shame as I can only reply in 140 characters 🙂
I might have to suck up Twitter replies and post them here. In fact, I think I will!
Replies from Twitter
Thought I’d post them here, to add a bit more content on what the Twitter network are saying:
hellquist/hellquist
@Thayer I have a proper reply that I will post over 17 tweets over the next hour. or not. well written. I break some of those myself. 😀
sizemore/sizemore
@thayer: Turning down my Tweet volume & content as you suggest would have lost me half the work I had last year. I like the noise & it pays
Nicholas Butler/loudmouthman
@thayer im with @sizemore though I have achieved more through volume in achieving sales leads and opportunity than I ever did in quality 12 minutes ago from web in reply to Thayer Icon_star_empty
Danie Ware/Danacea
@Thayer: throwing my weight behind the boys – Twitter is an open community and free; people use it for different things. Give a little, huh?
This is the fundamental reason why Twitter fails, and why it’s NOT a microblogging platform. Twitter, in its current form, functions best as a broadcast, largely one-way medium. Unlike Jaiku, it doesn’t have any kind of threading, which means it collapses if you @ reply more than a few times. You don’t want to see @ replies? Tough – your only option is unsubscribe.
Twitter is simply not a conversational medium, and that means it’s not microblogging – blogging, at the end of the day, differentiates itself from one-way publishing systems by its openess and ameanability to conversation.
In short – Twitter in its current form sucks. I still use it – but I’d really rather not.
Twitter doesn’t need etiquette
It’s totally fair enough if you don’t like the way that some people use Twitter, but they’re not imposing themselves on you because you opted in to receive their posts when you chose to follow them. If you don’t like it then unfollow, and leave those people who do like their posts to continue to follow them.
That’s the great thing about Twitter – unlike chatrooms and email lists, it doesn’t need any universal etiquette because we can each use it as we see fit and only follow people who use it in a way that’s acceptable to us. It’s a very democratic medium in that regard.
– Tom Nixon