I wrote this in response to a post on Google+ (which isn’t public so I can’t link to it) expressing a preference to G+ over Twitter, and citing Twitter’s weaker filtering as one of the reasons.
I find like Twitter a lot, and if I was to restrict myself to one and only one social network it would be Twitter. While the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t always perfect I find the 140-character limit makes it far easier to skim my feed and find the wheat amongst the chaff. Saying that, it’s still useful to do some housekeeping occasionally, and unfollow those who contribute too much noise and not enough signal.
I also like the way it works very well as a real-time conversation space. But it works better if you think it of it as a way to find and build relationships with interesting new people than as a subject-specific discussion forum. It’s like a virtual pub or a party where people talk in small groups rather than a formal meeting with a designated topic that mustn’t be derailed.
As a blogger I find the 140 character limit is a feature rather than a bug. It makes Twitter complimentary to blogging rather than being a substitute for it. Whenever I find that I can’t express a thought in 140 characters or less without losing nuance and creating too much ambiguity, I’ll expand it into a blog post instead.
Twitter isn’t perfect, and has more than it’s fair share of trolls. Though I find if you’re not high-profile and not going out of your way to pick fights, then they’re less of a problem. If you steer clear of the bottom half of Twitter (i.e. most trending topics), you won’t see many of them. My strategy is never to engage with the occasional random blowhard who pops up out of nowhere and is rude and aggressive in response to something I’ve said, and I frequently block them on sight.
I can’t use Twitter for anything other than one-way broadcasting, because if I try to keep up with it in anything other than the most cursory and useless way, I get flooded — and I don’t even follow that many people. Give people a firehose….
I use Tweetdeck and lists to make it more manageable. But you can think of Twitter as a stream you dip into when you have time rather than trying to read everything, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I’ve tried Tweetdeck and am now using Hootsuite mainly to broadcast. I just find the whole “dip in and read whenever” metaphor to not be very workable, because then you find yourself at odds with people who say “What, you didn’t know about X? It was all over Twitter the other week!” I figure anything important enough to be discussed or mentioned on Twitter will make the rounds of other venues eventually, so it’s just not worth the hassle for me.