Sunday, September 30, 2012

Twitter is not a Social Network

Recently, a Christian blogger who I respect mentioned me in a blog post, entitled Ranking blogs by Twitter followers. He had noticed the following tweet of mine: He said that he agreed with my usage of Twitter, and that it got him thinking about how people use Twitter. I wanted to simply post a comment on his blog, but since my response would be a bit off the topic of what he was actually trying to say, I thought I'd write a new one in response.

Thanks for the mention, Steve (follow Steve @hayesstw on Twitter)!

You are right. What I was trying to get at is this: on Facebook (for example) I try to limit my friends list to people I actually know in real life. On Twitter, my approach is completely different. I might follow someone on Twitter simply because I'm their friend in real life and I want to give them "the benefit of the doubt." But I'll quickly unfollow them if they continually tweet stuff that I have no interest in. I don't take offence at being unfollowed, and I expect that you won't, either.

I've said it before: to me, Twitter is NOT a social network! Sure, there are conversations taking place on Twitter all the time, but they're more of the academic debate kind than the "Hi, how are you?" kind. I use Twitter first and foremost as an Information Sharing Network. The vast majority of the things I share on Twitter are links to articles. Sometimes I share funny photos, or post updates without any links - but when I do that, it's to advertise events or venues that I've attended, and I try to mention people by their Twitter handles in those. This helps advertise those events and venues and get the organisers more followers. There's always a point.

And yes, if I find your posts interesting, informative, or funny, I'll follow you. If that ceases to be the case, I'll stop. My friendship with you, or whether I know you in real life or not, has nothing to do with it!

2 comments:

  1. Yes, that's much the same way as I use Twitter. It was a social network when it first started, though, when it urged you to say what you were doing right now (dumb question: posting on Twitter, of course). I thought it could be useful for members of my family to say I would be late for lunch, or was just being hijacked, or something like that, but none of my immediate family joined.

    The new "What's happening?" prompt had made it mainly a miniblog, in the original sense of "blog", ie a web log, links to web sites you have found interesting and want to recommend to others.

    And I've never asked people to follow me on Twitter.

    When I first started using it I used to resent it when people I didn't know followed me, but now I don't much care. Every now and then I look at their profiles, and if they're interested in the same things I am interested in, I might follow them in return, but some still remain a mystery, as their interests appear to be nothing like mine. Perhaps they want to use what I tweet about in evidence against me at a later stage.

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  2. hehe I used to watch my follower count religiously, and be over the moon when I got a new follower. Now I am only casually aware of it, although I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a pang of pride whenever I receive that e-mail "You have a new follower." ;-)

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