A few minutes ago I asked for everyone to please @cdevroe me their blog URL on Twitter. Here’s why.
After a few years of Twitter use I’ve found that, through trial and error, to keep a signal vs. noise balance and keeping the value of Twitter high enough for me to keep using it - I only follow a very few number of people (52 as of this writing) compared to the number of people that follow me (1,609 as of this writing).
It isn’t that I do not want to follow everyone back. I do. I’m actually pretty interested in the mundane. Whether you are involved in interesting projects, run a cool company, or just have an average life – I want to read about it. But when I tried that, I ended up not being able to keep up with Twitter at all. It was impossible. I missed important Tweets. I eventually ended up completely ignoring Twitter. The same thing happened to me on Flickr. Whenever my family would ask me “Did you see my latest photo on Flickr?” and I’d have to answer that I hadn’t – I knew I had too many Flickr contacts.
So, that is why I asked for everyone’s blog URL. If I can’t follow you on Twitter, I’m going to subscribe to your blog. That is my way of paying you back for following me. If your blog is interesting, well written, about a topic I like – I’ll probably be subscribed for years to come. In fact, I may even link to it or suggest that other’s subscribe!
So, to all of you that responded and gave me your blog’s URL. I’m now subscribed to it and am looking forward to reading what you’re up to. Thanks for following me on Twitter.
7 Comments
What a great idea Colin. It is difficult for me too in twitter to keep up. Sometimes I guess I found a good balance in following back a few hundred people that have valuable things to say.
But I question your solution. How are you going to keep up with potentially hundreds of longer blog posts if twitter at 140 characters is an issue? Seems like even more info that you’ll have to wade through.
Joel Mark Witt
Joel: Good question. I check my feed reader every few days and, for the lack of a better term, skim through the posts pretty quickly. I don’t just read the headlines, I read a bit more than that. But I do see every single post and look at it to see if it interests me. I then either read it then and there or star it for later.
So while it will increase the number of feeds I have loaded up (I gained over 250 unread with this little experiment) – I should be able to get through them relatively quickly and I may even end up finding some things I would have never seen otherwise. I am hoping, if nothing else, this extends the walls of my echo chamber a little bit.
Hm, what an interesting idea. I’ve had the same problem. I’m struggling to keep the number of people I follow under 100. I’ve somehow managed to keep my friends list on Viddler relatively small, so I only receive emails about videos from people whose videos I actually care about. Perhaps I should go through the list of people I’m following and cut it down a bit, because as much as I like to read every tweet, I can’t keep up any more.
I think this is something that most people struggle with, whether with Twitter or blogs.
My very loose rules of thumb for following goes something like this. 1. Friends and people I’ve met IRL. 2. People or shows with content I’m interested in. 3. People with ideas or projects I want to support.
I’m interested to know how this works out for you. If nothing else, you’ve inspired me to refocus more energy into my blog. I’ve struggled with it thus far and this is a very motivating reason to start putting more effort into my content. Thanks!
Miiitch: Yeah. It is a struggle to keep a balance.
Chris Runoff: My reading your blog is a motivation? Awesome!
Twitter is where I get 98% of my news, links, videos, etc.
TweetDeck has made the experience so amazing! I’m able to read the majority of the tweets I receive from the 143 (at writing) people I follow. A good percentage of them tweet rarely or not at all, but then some tweet excessively; I guess there’s a balance.
If I were to also read/watch the news, subscribe to blogs, and receive e-mail updates from people, I’d never have time to eat, sleep, and tweet.
I respect the people that manage to do that though.
Thanks for subscribing to my blog, Colin.
Very cool idea! I had to limit the people I follow on twitter too for the same reason. I probably still follow too many people right now, I’m always afraid I’m going to miss an important tweet from one of my ‘real’ friends.
One Trackback
[...] | Emerald Isle, NC – Sept. 2007 | » « Why I asked for your URL February 12th, [...]