Tag: twitter

A return to Twitter (not the service, but the community)

After the frustration with the Twitter service for changes like this, I thought I would give up Twitter. However, Twitter is the sum of a number of parts: there is the service that Twitter provides, from the backend servers to the APIs to the user interfaces and client software you use;  and then there are the people that contribute to Twitter. Among those contributors are people I really enjoy socializing with whom I cannot connect with any other way. To give up all of Twitter means tossing out the baby, the bathwater and even the tub itself. That’s dumb. (I do dumb things often, but typically correct most of them in time. :))

To get around that, I decided to use my limited software skills and the APIs that Twitter provides to write my own Twitter client, in a way. It is a hack, but it is a good hack (for me). I am able to control what I see this way. Not only do I not have promoted tweets, etc., in my feed, but I am able to get rid of things like RTs from everyone, rather than having to turn of RTs one at a time. I’m also able to save all the tweets in a spreadsheet or some other format, so I can look at them when I am less busy, or decide on other filters I want to apply, etc. Later on I can write more filters so if a trending topic gets to be too much, I can just delete it or save it to a different file for later.

Now my Twitter experience is gone from poor to great (for me).  I have thrown out the dirty bath water, but kept the tub and the baby. This makes more sense, obviously.

Last but not least, I appreciate all the people who expressed concern over my leaving Twitter. It was very kind of you, and why I want to stick around, if I can.

 

I am giving up on Twitter

I am going to take a sabbatical from twitter. It’s been a long time coming, but now it feels like it is due.

Twitter has always been a weak service filled with great people that made it great despite it’s weakness. That weakness has been there since the Fail Whale days, yet there was something unique about it that made me stick around.

In what appears to be its increasing effort to become less unique and more like Facebook, I am feeling less and less like sticking around. For whatever reason, last night Twitter decided I needed to read more tweets on Ferguson in the U.S.  (This is remarkable, since almost all of the tweets I was reading in my feed and on lists were regarding Ferguson). To accomplish this, it first gave me tweets that people I follow favorited. Then it started giving me tweets of a journalist that someone I know follows. It’s one thing to put sponsored tweets in my feed, but when twitter takes away control of my feed and just fills it with tweets it presumes I want to read, I am done with being a big user of this service.

I used to love Twitter as a service. I loved it and promoted it since the beginning. Recently, though, it has become a poor experience for me. As a service, I now consider it like I consider Facebook or LinkedIn: something I can use to stay in touch with people and share things, but not much more.

I expect I will still share good things with people and actively encourage people who take the time and effort to share good things with me. During this time, I will look at new tools and new platforms to be social and to make the world a better place. (Maybe I’ll write my own.) Perhaps right now someone is working on a new and better Twitter.

Thanks for the follows, favorites,  retweets and replies.