Besides the little oops in security last night/presently through which some anonymous person was able to post to my stream, and the poor server performance (although it has been better lately), what bugs me most about Twitter is that it will show direct replies that my contacts have made to people I don’t know. Essentially, Twitter lets me see one side of a conversation in great deal.
It wouldn’t be so bad, except I’ve got some contacts that more or less use Twitter in place of IM. Are they right to do this? Meh, I’m not passing judgement. They’re free to use Twitter any way that they like. I think that the real problem is that I only see one side of the IM conversation if I’m not following both parties. Why can’t Twitter only display direct replies to me if I’m following both parties? I don’t really care what @friendofmine is saying to @personidontknow. Generally, if someone has something interesting to share, they’ll just generally post it and not direct message someone with it (@mezzoblue’s stream is a good example, so is @ryancarson’s stream).
On a day to day basis, 90% of the activity I see in Twitteriffic is just junk because I have no context for it. I was considering pruning my following list — but some of these people are friends. Why should I block them out?
8 Comments
Some tips:
1) Its not all about you, you self centered ninny.
2) If you find the half of the conversation interesting, you can go read the context. Otherwise, ignore it.
3) Don’t follow idiots who do stupid things. I avoid people who use Twitter to self advocate in almost all cases. They are the worst offenders.
1. It is all about me. My mom says so.
No, but seriously, the only reason I even use twitter is because I know it’s not all about me. Your tweets are interesting, and some of the others I mentioned above contain good stuff too. Others are inside conversations amongst people. Why does twitter publish that to my stream?
2. Yes, and I can ignore spam, and people IMing me about lame things, and pop-up ads, and banner ads, and nekkid men with advertising tattooed across their bodies — still doesn’t mean that I want to see it every day.
3. I definitely don’t follow idiots. I do follow friends though, and our former place of employment is a great example. I like knowing what @akolade is up to, but I never met @janeleo — so anytime they’re having a conversation (which is usually multiple times a day) I only get half of it — which is really just a waste of time. It’s not a waste of time because of what either of them have to say, it’s just that I have no context and I’m not going to click through a bunch of pages to find out.
An example from earlier today: @mwarf tweeted: @janeleo She’s lost the flock of seagulls hair however
While I may be able to trace that back by hitting @janeleo’s stream etc, it’s just not THAT interesting so that I’m inclined to take 3 minutes out of my day to do so.
I thought Twitter wasn’t supposed to show you those types of tweets (replies to people who you aren’t following). I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it randomly did, given Twitters record for random weirdness.
@Akolade Yeah, it would make sense not to… but it does. I frequently see yours and @mwarf and @maulrat’s side of conversations with people I don’t follow….
Hey J,
Have you see our settings for @replies?
http://twitter.com/account/notifications
There are a few controls to filter the conversations a bit to only those direct at you or people you follow.
Jack.
Thanks for that Jack. So if I set it to “only people I’m following, does that filter out @replies from people that I am following to people I’m not following (like I was bitching about)?
Re #3: You follow Mezzoblue. We can all draw our own conclusions from there.
As for that setting, what it will do is let you see the other side of the conversation IF the other party has public view AND they use the correct @ notation.
Hey, some of us know who Dave Shea is Mr. Pollard. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.