Monday, April 26, 2010

Twitter Diarrhea !!!

Twitterhea or Twitter Diarrhea sucks. Unlike real diarrhea it mostly sucks for the followers but it also sucks for the people afflicted with it. If you use twitter you’ve probably experienced this at some point. It’s the point in time when some user decides i have really important things to say and i’m going to say them all RIGHT NOW.

I did a search on this topic and i’m certainly not the first person to write about this issue. However what they were talking about was mostly in regards to minutia. As in no one wants two tweets expressing the fact that 1) you just put the pickle on your sandwich and 2) you’re eating your sandwich. One would be sufficient if either.

However as obvious as it is that no one cares about your minutia it’s much less obvious to consider whether the volume of what you’re writing is too much even if it’s extremely useful.

We’re all busy people with real jobs and things to do. Twitter is a useful learning tool and we love when people share things that are interesting/informative/funny etc. Yet no matter how interesting/informative/funny the things you’re sharing are if i see a tweet from you every few minutes i’m going to assume what you’re sharing is just a list of things and none are all that important.

In fact the volume of minutia can be much greater then the links you share because at least something like having a sandwich i can view and move on from. When I see a link i have to decide whether its interesting enough to click and to repeat what i said above if i see alot of tweets at once i’ll assume they’re not that interesting.

In other words by tweeting too much no matter how valuable your tweets are you’ve devalued all your tweets.

I won’t put a number on what’s too much it probably varies for different people. So when you’re tweeting just remember to tweet wisely.