Lowther Rinse Repeat

10 Things That Will Make Me Not Follow You on Twitter January 5, 2009

I’ve been on twitter for quite a while now and I absolutely love it. It’s a great way to learn and keep up with friends, but as twitter grows, so to does the base of people who begin to friend you on the site. With this, I’ve stopped following everyone that adds me back - well I never actually added everyone, but I am far more selective now than I was when I first joined the site. Whenever someone I don’t personally know adds me, I take a peek over at their twitter page and do a quick mental judgment of whether or not I want to add them back. I though I’d share with you my quick mental checklist, so if you’ve added me on twitter and I’ve not added you back, now you know why.

1. Your profile looks like MySpace. For the sweet dear love of god, one MySpace is more than I can take - please reconsider that really flashy busy picture that you’ve got tiled across the background of your MySpace twitter page and your animated flashing GIF (see point 2).
2. You have a flashing animated GIF for your avatar. This is ancillary to #1, visual assaults on my eyes are in no way appreciated or wanted, if you’re page makes me want to jab things into my eyes, I’m going to run away as fast as humanly possible. Thankfully, I’m only following a couple of people who have done this and only because I was following them prior to twitter allowing people to use these and everytime I see their avatar, I start to reconsider it.
3. You have no avatar. This is a social networking site, be social and share a bit of yourself.  It’s not a dating site and you don’t have to worry about the person sitting next to you at work seeing you on the site - and even if it was a dating site, your buddy was on the dating site as well, so open up a bit - I promise no one is going to laugh at you:)
4. You follow way more people that follow you back - this goes doubly so for accounts with almost no tweets. If you’ve got 100 followers, but you’re following 2,500 people and you’ve only got 5 tweets, sorry I’m moving on.
5. You only promote your own links without adding anything else back to the community. Twitter is a two way communication tool, not a platform to send out one way broadcasts - this only works if you’re the New York Times and trust me, you aren’t. We all promote our own posts on twitter, but if that’s all you do, no one is going to want to listen to you - you are pure noise.
6. You’re a one way tweeter. ie/ you have no @’s in your twitter stream. The brilliance of twitter is the two way nature of the platform, learning and communicating with others that you find interesting. Please reference my previous point.
7. You mention going to the bathroom anywhere in your twitter stream - I’m looking at you Ehsan on this one:) You’re lucky I know you IRL.
8. You’ve got protected tweets. Unless I personally know who you are, I am not going to follow anyone with protected tweets. I figure the only reason to protect your tweets is to limit your tweets to personal friends, hence the lack of follow back.
9. You never shut up. Yes twitter is a communications platform, but I don’t want my entire twitterfeed to be dedicated to your ramblings. This is a pretty subjective one, but if you put out more than about 15 tweets (excluding repies) a day, they’ve got to be pretty damn good and insightful for me to add you.
10. You’re twitter profile is a dead end with no bio info. Tell me a bit about yourself, why do I want to listen to you?

I’m sure I’ve missed a ton and will most likely update the list as new pet peeves come to me. I’d love to hear what bugs you the most on twitter and what makes you not want to follow people.

How Do You Communicate With People? September 10, 2008

It occurred to me the other day that I don’t like talking on the phone much, I greatly prefer to text, email, IM or twitter someone.  Don’t get me wrong, I still do call people regularly when it is needed, but you will no longer find me calling friends and acquaintances without a specific reason or spending copious amounts of time on the phone in a single conversation.

This struck me as somewhat odd, as when I was younger, I was on the phone constantly.  So much so, that when I was a teenager, my Mom actually gave me my own personal phoneline for my 13th birthday so that other people in the house could actually make a call when I was at home.  I would spend hours on end having random unfocused conversations.

This made me wonder, at what point in my life did my preferred method of communication shift from that of the traditional telephone to these newer methods of reaching out and touching someone.  The very first time I made an email account was in 2001, when I went back to University and they required us to have one for an online marketing class that I took.  And I never used MSN until I’d graduated University in 2006, when my job required it.

At first, I found IM to be very annoying and distracting from work and really only used email when I needed to send a file over to a classmate.  Today, at any given time I’ve got a dozen IM tabs open, am twittering regularly, and am constantly sending emails. Quite often now, my phone will ring and I’ll think why is someone calling me?

So I can narrow down the scope of this communications shift to the past 2 years, but why?  Is it because of what I do for a living and it’s just a natural communications progression, as you’re far more likely to find me infront of a computer than not?  I can’t really answer this question, but it’s got me thinking anyhow.

Has this happened to you? Do you still chat on the phone regularly with friends and family or do you pick up the phone to call a store instead of heading over to their website to see if you can’t source the information your searching for yourself? Or is this just me?