Last night I had an interesting discussion with my friend and fellow podcaster Ed about social media, twitter in particular. It was a short, but very potent, conversation. We talked about what we expect and what we get from various social media services. I think it’s very clear that twitter is a very one sided and self serving medium for most people. It’s sad, but there is very little communication on twitter since most content is one way. I try to comment and have short discussions with the people I follow, but I am clearly in the minority.
The end result is me spending a bunch of time during the day wading through tweets from people that I will likely have no meaningful dialog with. I actually have a list of people I sincerely care about so I can make sure I don’t miss something I feel is important. A prime example of this was when my friend Tim Jennings lost his job at G4. He tweeted about it, but I lost it in a sea of crap. It wasn’t until almost a month later when I saw a post on a message board about it that I finally heard the news. I felt like an ass.
So what is happening is I am wasting time that should be spent on my work, missing out on truly important things happening to people I care about and overall enjoying the experience less. My solution for this is simple, I’m going to cut my following list down drastically. I already cut forty follows today and I will likely cut even more over the next week. My personal twitter is going to be just that, a personal twitter. It’s not going to be a twitter for the podcast or for anything else. It’s going to be for me. Some people might not like it, but I’m sorry… it’s not business, it’s personal.
