Mobile Musings

I recently read an article about how Twitter employees use Twitter. They don’t tweet very often and they don’t follow very many people. They appear to be using Twitter in the manner it was intended rather than in the manner it has become.

Twitter was intended to let people–a small group of friends and family, perhaps–know what you are doing. That’s fine, but Twitter has evolved into something much more than that. Unless you’re a personal friend of the person that’s tweeting, you don’t much care if that person is eating breakfast or sitting on the can. What Twitter has evolved into is a collective of thoughts, ideas, and information that is beginning to influence the world around us. A Tworg collective, if you will.

In the article, CEO Evan Williams responded to the observations of Marshall Kirkpatrick with this statement:

Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. … I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.

I don’t think it’s a trap. I think it’s a choice. And I think it’s the better choice. Here’s why:

Communication in general, and Twitter specifically, is a two-way street. People are willing to listen, but they also want to be heard. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you actually listen, but that you are willing to. Celebrities that follow back get more followers because they *might* be heard.

I currently follow over 11,000 people. Obviously, I can’t read everything that all of those people tweet, but that’s what filters are for. Desktop clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck to a very good job of allowing you to create groups so you only have to “listen” to a select few. I have groups for personal friends, for technical tweeters, and an “other” group for those people I generally find interesting. However, every once in a while, I glance over at the “All Friends” feed and something catches my eye. I’ll investigate that person further and if their previous tweets are interesting, I’ll add them to one of my filtered lists. If I didn’t follow back 90% of the people that follow me, I would have missed out on some very interesting people.  This is partly a time issue because I can’t properly evaluate every single person that follows me, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.  And I can either filter or unfollow them later.

The way I see it, my personal Tworg collective is better the more people I have in it. Everyone is welcome to join my collective so that I might find something interesting come across my communication neurons. The exception is that if a new Tworg tells me they made a lot of money on Twitter, or I can get 16,000 more Tworgs to my collective in the next 30 days, I’ll sever my connection to them and leave them in deep space with a can of processed meat to chew on until they find the next cube.

We are Tworg. Resistance is futile.