Twitter vs. Productivity: It doesn't have to be winner takes all

For five months now I've hardly read the Twitter stream of those I follow on the service. Also, I rarely tweet on anything except when my blog software sends a notice of a new post (via the Drupal Twitter Module), much like the automation on most news service Twitter accounts. I've been enormously productive.

Every time I happen to see an interesting Tweet, I dig around in my stream to see if there were other interesting comments or conversations. Sometimes I find something or learn something new or get a bunch of URLs to investigate. Most of the time it's hard to find anything amidst the noise.

Tom Limoncelli, who I like to quote, recently wrote about the Twitter time sink problem, but his solution was to just stop using it altogether. I like instant, yet still asynchronous communication like SMS, IM, IRCor email. The problem is that the first two are only for private, single person to single person communication media. IRC and email allow for a broadcast to multiple people, but their limitation is that they only send information to those people either on the same IRC channel at the same time as the sending of a message or, in the case of email, to the people on the recipient list. Twitter is both broadcast and public (with the option of locking, or protecting an account to keep non-followers out). By using Twitter, I can be part of a larger, organic conversation, and I can increase the exposure of my message (which, in turn, means increasing exposure to my blog).

I found the cure for this signal-to-noise (SNR) problem while still using Twitter. I stopped following high traffic streams unless it is a stream I am very interested in or it is a close, personal friend. Also, I just removed some more that were geographically pertinent to my previous home in Wisconsin (see my earlier post about job changes and moving on that topic) than my current location in New York. Then, I removed some folks that weren't relevant to my life or work in a direct way. For example, some people I originally followed because I thought they would be helpful or interesting for my professional development or directly related to my profession or industry. Yet, many of those usually tweet more about unrelated matters or their personal lives, which has meaning in the context of being involved with that person on a personal and traditionally social level but does not have meaning in the context of my professional development. I use twitter to be part of the larger socio-economic and political landscape of our time, so unless these tweets are from a personal friend it turns into a time sink and a distraction from my own life, both professionally and personally.

For anyone that I am no longer following, please accept my apologies. It has nothing to do with who you are, your ideas, or anything else about you as a person, both privately and professionally. It just means our use of Twitter differs, and I have a finite amount of time available for reading streams or URLs that come from them.