Hello, my name is Andy. I like advertising and the internet.

Twitter Reboot™

Posted: January 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Digital, Social, Technology | Tags: | 2 Comments »

The annual social clean-up is in progress. I’ve already shut down my Posterous and Tumblr accounts to focus on my blog. Now it’s time to deal with Twitter.

I love Twitter. It covers such an incredible spectrum of information; but recently it’s begun to feel out of control. The signal-to-noise was wrong and stuff from people I cared about was being drowned out.

I started by unfollowing a few heavy/active users. But I enjoy a lot of the stuff they share so it didn’t feel massively practical. Then @sermad suggested I made more of lists. I created a few and moved a bunch of people over.

Great! But my timeline was still too noisy.

I tried unfollowing a few more people but couldn’t create a clear mental criteria in my head.

Take my friends and ex-colleagues at glue as an example. I don’t want 180+ people on my timeline, but once you start to add a few, you’re into a strange mental world of… If I add X, I should add Y, because we did X together. In the end I was trying to do something ridiculous like:

People I worked with for more than 4 years + that I regulary went out for beers with + that use Twitter regularly + but not so much that they drown everyone else out = Following.

It wasn’t working. I got frustrated.

So I went BIG and unfollowed everybody.

WOOHOO!!

It might’ve been a bit impulsive but it’s democratic and I can slowly add people back over time.

I have a nagging doubt though. It’s counter intuitive. Lists guarantee I see peoples stuff; but they think I’ve unfollowed them. Not great really. But I needed to wrestle control back of the timeline so I’ve taken the plunge.

I’m sure some people will unfollow me.

Or add me to Lists…

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