Twitter is definitely a phenomena that is here to stay, and now that Oprah (@Oprah) has joined forces, user numbers are going to increase even faster (if that’s at all possible – David Armano questions such an increase).
Now I am not going to talk about the limitation of characters to less than 140 – someone already suggested such a “service” called flutter.
As a relatively new twitter user, I can testify that following even a “meager” number of 129 “tweeple” (twitter people) is quite hard. True, it brings with it a lot of insights and interactions, but at a cost of interruptions to my daily work. While I am struggling to keep the pace, Ken Camp comes up with a thoughtful post on the value of following fewer people on Twitter:
The human brain can only maintain a finite set of friends, whatever we call our social network. I have no interest in following more people that I can actually pay attention to. So if you follow me on Twitter, and I don’t know you or we’ve not interacted, odds are high that I won’t follow you back. Why would I. You’re not part of my network and that’s who I engage with on Twitter.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement, and yet, working in the VoIP industry means following a large (and growing) number of people.
And then the question that comes to mind: why did twitter only limit us just to the amount of characters in a message? Why not limit us even more?
Here are two ideas:
- Limit the number of people a person can follow. There’s a limitation today, but how about limiting it to a hard value of 500? Or 100? Facebook limits the number of friends to 5000. Have people pay for a premium service, which allows them to follow more. It will serve as a nice revenue stream for twitter, but it will also make me think three times before I follow someone (now I think only twice).
- Limit the number of twits people can send. How about letting me send only a twit an hour? Or 10 a day? I wouldn’t count responses as part of that number. That will definitely remove the amount of noise out there. It will make it easier for me to follow more people…
Would you limit more than what you get today from twitter? Can you think of other limitations that I am missing here?
Tags: David Armano, Ken Camp, Oprah, Twitter
Comments and trackbacks
1. Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 20th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
As you might have suspected, I beg to differ.
I think quantity is not a relevant measure. Quality is.
I think that following 10 tweeple who say nothing is worthless. Following 200 tweeple that supply you with valuable words of wisdom and links are great.
As long as you maintain a high quality of content, numbers are irrelevant. Have you ever considered limiting the number of feeds in you RSS reader?
Unlike Ken Camp, I think the people I follow are not my “friends” (although I wish some were). They are colleagues, experts and smart people in general, who I love to read. They supply me of doses of useful data. Some tweet once a day, some tens of times. Still, as long as the quality is high, I can bare their 140 characters.
If Twitter needs anything, it may be sort of “tweet rank”, blocking spammers, over-marketers and stupid people in general.
Other than that, please don’t limit Twitter. I like it just the way it is.
2. Tsahi Levent-Levi | April 21st, 2009 at 6:02 am
Ranking would be nice, but I wouldn’t rank people – I’d rank individual twits somehow.
3. Ruben Olsen | April 25th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Actually – I believe that it is not the number that is the issue here, it is the quality of the people you follow. This may seems like a no-brainer for old timers for (non-verbal) communication – but it is really not a no-brainer for a lot of people. I have seen the same of Facebook – people collect contacts. Even on LinkedIn some people collect contacts.
In principle I do agree with Ken that quality trumps quantity any time of day. However, there are exception to the rule. I do follow a very few people that are following a couple of thousands people. My reason for following these people are not that I need them to listen to what I have to say. I really do not care if people listen to what I have to say – it is not important for me personally. I do follow these people simply because they provide high quality content.
I also want support for tribes in Twitter – not as a 3rd party. Given that my comment is too long already, I’ll just put a pointer to my musings around what I put into tribes: http://www.open-voip.com/blogs/blog1/2009/04/09/i-want-tribes-instead-of-friends
On the other hand – if people decide to follow me I do sincerely hope that it is because that I contribute good content. That is fine with me. It does not boost my ego – it does not boost my self confidence (yes – I know I am an arrogant pri*k). I contribute because I seriously believe that I have something worth reading. If not, I rather shut up.
One issue is the current crop of Twitter clients (in lack of a better word). Most (all?) clients do not support something as simple as filtering. Unless there are filtering capabilities built into those clients sooner or later people will move on to less crowded services. If I had such capabilities today I could have filters for “friends and family” and then work related matters (which is my primary reason why I use Twitter). I can not ditch my friends and families from my Twitter feed. I also refuse to have more than one Twitter account.
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