Friday, December 19, 2008

Problem with Twitter

Disclaimer : This post reverberates only my opinions and doesn't refer to or mean anything offensive to Twitter or the people cited below.

I believe Twitter has been astoundingly successful, and it marked the coming of social networking x.0 (I frankly don't know what the version is, and I rather not mess with that).
It exactly does what it is says - What're you doing? 140 characters of your status - that's all is required to let your friends/family/fans/followers know.

It certainly has attracted a lot of biggies into the game (read : timOreilly, sethgodin, d2h guykawasaki etc.), and lets people keep themselves updated on what these guys are upto. But I guess, it didn't take care of a few things here. Take my case, I have very few friends(or in Twitterminology - followers) and I started following timoreilly on Twitter. As soons as I started following him, my page was exploded with posts from Tim that I lost the posts from my friends in the rubble. Imagine if I had subscribed to all the guys I have cited as examples. Phew !!

The updates from Tim very so frequent and so many that I didn't opt for the device setup. And embarrasingly, I removed the updates on my email that I got from Twitter, which is the sole purpose of registering on Twitter. Finally I had to unfollow Tim (No , I mean not even a bit of, offence meant to Tim. Period. He's a great guy, and has lots of things going on. I or anyone can't blame him for anything!!)


What I meant to say is, Twitter does gives you the privilege to follow influential people and get a piece of their ideas/style/philosophy without interfering their privacy and that's awesome. Probably that's why you don't see most of these guys on Facebook,Orkut, or other Social Apps where you get friend requests, wall posts, birthday reminders, photos, videos blah..blah..blah. But with so many posts coming from these guys, I feel the purpose of Twitter is losing somewhere.
I do want to follow these guys and at the same time, dont want to lose updates from my friends and I dont want a rush of updates. After all, who needs a Tweet every minute that's not personally important.
The only way that could be handled is to have the ability to group people you follow under categories like Friends, Colleagues, Influential people, Marketers etc. so that you can check what you need the most at the hour

Can something be done about this.
Twitter, are you listening ?

PS: I love the updates from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Succinct, to-the-point and every tweet's worth reading

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