Is Twitter Where Connections Go to Die? – The Unfollowing Experiment – The Follow-Up

2 thoughts on “Is Twitter Where Connections Go to Die? – The Unfollowing Experiment – The Follow-Up”

  1. Glad the experiment goes well, I think the most important aspect of it, is the thinking process behind. Is the question “how can I use the tool at its best for myself?” and “even if a tool is designed for a particular use, is there any other way to use it?”. I wish everyone would ask such questions before effective usage.
    I also think that the follow/unfollow system is badly used, as you say, it’s not only to follow people we really want to experience, but as self promotion and marketing. Its the same push as the leaflets ads coming into our mailbox.
    I guess as well that many of us are just following way too many people that we can effectively digest with the given time.

    I have also two questions for you Luis: how much portion of your time (%) do you dedicate to Twitter? and Do you also follow some hashtags on top of your lists?

    and thanks a lot for sharing.

    1. Ciao Lele! Thanks a lot for dropping by and for those wonderful comments! Greatly appreciated. You know what, I have always been a huge fan of exaptation, as an opportunity to hack our very own user experiences with the social tools we use and see if we can discover other undocumented ways of working that could prove to be equally effective, if not more altogether! It’s the exact same thing I’m doing with Twitter and one of the most neglected, yet most powerful capabilities from Twitter itself: Lists. And why I’m so keen on pursuing this experiment and converting it into my modus operandi when I’m on Twitter. It’s helped me transformed the way I use it today and I don’t think I’d be able to go back to anything else, unless I decide to hack it again into something else, which, so far, it hasn’t come up just yet… We shall see, but in full agreement with your quote to explain it as well: ‘I wish everyone would ask such questions before effective usage.’

      And you are very accurate as well in terms of how we seem to have bastardised the entire idea about following / follower based on those ego / vanity metrics. You know, there used to be a time where there were some rumours about Twitter dropping out showing up those numbers, but they eventually backed out from that idea. Too bad, because it would have been really nice to not have them and then observe how people would have made use of the tool. I bet the user experience would have been completely different!

      RE: _’how much portion of your time (%) do you dedicate to Twitter?’_, this would pretty much depend on how busy people are when tweeting along, but an average is two different sessions of 20 minutes each. One in the morning, right when I’m about to start working, and the other one in the early evening, to see what has happened during the course of the day. So, in total about 40 minutes per day, spaced out in two chunks of 20 minutes. I know that for some folks it may well be way too much, just as well as too little for a number of other people, but this is what’s currently working for me and rather well, so I’m sticking with it.

      RE: ‘Do you also follow some hashtags on top of your lists?’, I surely do, but there is a bit of a difference. I check the three lists every single day at either of those two 20 minute long chunks, whereas with hashtags I have got a number of them I follow, but I only check them every other day and not always. It’s more a bit of a dip in and out, see what people are saying on that particular hashtag, identify new topics or interesting people to follow, and move on. It’s not as exhaustive and engaging as I am doing with lists, but I still use hashtags, specially, for generally themed topics, or for conference events where people would be live tweeting and I’d want to catch up with what happen during the event itself.

      Hope that helps, Lele. Let me know if you’d need more help or info details on those work flows for Twitter. I am thinking about putting together a short screencast on the topic to explain a little bit about it all works for me, so may post it in the next few days… We’ll see.

      Thanks much, once again! 😀👍🏻

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