How and why I use Twitter

Recently I copped some flak regarding my Twitter usage policies. So now we've all calmed down I thought I'd whip the storm up again by explaining why and how I use Twitter: this technique might be useful for you.

When I started on Twitter I followed quite a few people but I found the flow overwhelming. I'm not a compulsive reader and I don't like to devote too much of my scarce time to social media, so I'm never going to get through them all.

So phase 2 of my Twitter usage was to cut back to following 40 people maximum. I stayed that way for a long time as an exercise in discipline, to try to get a refined distilled stream like some sort of elite liqueur, but frankly that got boring because the stream was not diverse enough. More importantly, one of the great failing of the internet is that it doesn't actually expand the horizons of many users, it narrows them by allowing them to link up with fellow goat-fondlers, homeopathic-fishermen, Tea-Parties or Marxist-anarchists around the planet and convince each other that their value set is valid. There's a book about small isolated groups building values with no external reference or input: Lord of the Flies. One needs to follow a wide enough set of people to get some balance and variety in your tweet diet.

Nor are you under any moral or ethical obligation to read everything your followees tweet, any more than I would walk around behind my real-life friends all day to make sure I heard everything they said. That's just silly. The internet is a flowing river of information, a vast Amazon. You can't hope but to sip from it, to scoop a handful now and then. Twitter is just one current of that river and to try to drink it all is to drown, or at least to make yourself sick.

So I cranked it back up. I now follow about 900 people. And no I'm not whoring by doing that: I'm not gaming Klout or other metrics by following lots of people. I don't follow indiscriminately: I carefully select who I follow and usually I select from those who are already following me, or otherwise from those who get mentioned in tweets. I first check out what they have said recently, to make sure it isn't dominated by food, football, where-i-am-now, technological geekery, or religion. If their tweets look high-value, I follow. I do leave out those whose views completely repel me: the dippy left, the ultra right, new-agers, the puerile and the profane. But I try to be catholic in my selections - picking up a wide variety - not just IT types and especially not just ITSM wonks. Still, if you go through my followees you'll see I follow for my work interests only: there is still lots of ITSM and all IT. Twitter for me is a work information tool.
[Update Feb 2014: I'm down to following 240 because I found editing a Twitter list too cumbersome, so my only "list" is my set of followees. But that set of 240 is too small: it is getting a bit borinfly familiar (the overall stream not the individuals!). Time to add a few hundred, get more diversity.]

Is this an abuse of "follow"? What does "follow" mean? Says you. I say it means I want to sometimes hear what they say. it doesn't mean I'm friends with them, or that I find them influential, or I am preparing to marry them. It means I follow them on twitter. "Follow" means whatever you think it means as you use Twitter and nobody has any right to tell you otherwise (except Twitter). It's your stream. Twitter can be a personal social network: a Facebook Lite. Or a professional network, LinkedIn Lite. Or - as it is for me - a zeitgeist radar, a random sampling of what's goin' on. So "follow" means whatever you want it to mean as an information tool for you.

How do I deal with the stream from 900 people? Simple. I dip into it once or twice a day for a random sample of what's happening. The serendipity is terrific: I pick up all sorts of high-value stuff. Often it is extremly lateral content that stimulates me to new creative thought directions, because I'm sampling widely. That would seldom happen with 40 followees - we're all on the same page. In addition to this occasional dip into the Home stream, I more closely read most of the tweets from a private Twitter list I maintain called "interesting". That is my real primary twitter stream. It is none of your busines who's on it: there are 34 people on it right now.
[Update 2014: I still have that list but it is out of date because it is a pain to maintain. Most of us aren't OCD enough to be constantly tuning these things. I just read my main stream now. ]

I do agree there is a maximum number to follow before it gets really meaningless, before in fact you are pretty clearly following for the sake of followers. But I think that number is way in the thousands. I reckon I could sustainably follow over a thousand people. I may well pass that number soon. They drop off as they annoy me too much, but at a much slower rate than I'm adding them. Once it gets into four figures I think I'll have a good clean out and perhaps halve the list. Or not... what does it matter? My Home stream is the murmer of a crowd, one which I wander through from time to time to see what I can pick up. What does it matter how big that crowd is?

The other change I made not too long ago was to split into two personas on twitter: @theitSkeptic and @rob_england. My personal views were creeping into the @theiteskeptic stream, and those views can be a bit extreme for some people. I don't much like religion - I find most of it absurd - and I detest any irrational thought, such as the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-medecine, anti-nuclear or anti-vaccination camps. Rather than alienate those who follow @theitskeptic for work purposes, I split. The Hootsuite interface allows me to regularly forget and post to the wrong stream anyway, so I may or may not continue with the complexity of multiple personas. Overall, I think it is appropriate. Google+ circles provide a similar though more subtle mechanism.
[Update Feb 2014: I couldn't be bothered with 2 accounts. I'm back to just one. Mostly I just don't share extreme personal observations on Twitter at all. It's too crude a tool anyway: strong opinions need nuanced discussion that 140 char won't give you. If I really want to vent I use Google+ or my personal blog bothol.org.]

There are all sorts of other netiquette rules to Twitter. It is good if we evolve netiquette as a community. We did it with email: don't SHOUT BY TYPING EVERYTHING IN CAPS. Don't reply-all. Use BCC when sending to a distribution list of addresses unless they have all already agreed to share addresses. But look at how often those rules are still broken, just as any etiquette rules are regularly broken in the real world. Twitter etiquette will always be broken. What's more, it is still evolving. I don't think there is general agreement on what the rules are. It is clear to me we need more thought and more subtlety in what the rules are.

I get stick for re-tweeting tweets with my name in. They are usually where a client like Pink, Beetil, Citrix, ManageEngine etc have announced a post I have written for them and I retweet it to draw it to the attention of my followers. That's not vanity, that is sharing. It is also fulfilling my commitment to those clients to use my twitter presence to spread the word. It seems to me that if I left my handle out of the retweet that would be disingenuous, a form of failure to disclose my involvement in the linked article. And if I didn't retweet it I'd not be sharing content I wrote with my followers which seems dumb. To retweet the original post from my client is to make greater disclosure of the commercial link than to just tweet "Ooh look what I just wrote" without disclosing who I wrote it for.

Never mind the details of the arcane debates: the point is that expectations of twitter usage are far from settled. Even when the social rules do start to clarify, you are no more bound by Twitter conventions than you are by any other social rules. Chris Dancy and I agreed on this: Chris said

there are no rules on twitter. Seriously, no rules! You can do and say what you want. Just like real life!!!! Unfortunately, just like real life, you are being measured and excluded based on your perceived value.

..., and you can regard disapproval from the arbiters of taste with the same concern or amusement that you would in the real world. For example, I don't give a flying fox what Klout thinks because I know it is but a simplistic algorithm that cannot hope to measure true influence, or any other human characteristic or relationship.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to put my shorts and sandals on, have a beer for lunch, swear at the dog, and go play with toy trains in the garden.