lost in ..twitter

confused by SpoonLV on deviantART

I’m not a social media fan, but I thought to give twitter a try. I’m using it for a month now and I have a question for all the twitter users: How can you manage this enormous amount of information??

The first couple of days (when I was following about 80 users), I tried to read every single tweet while I was working on my computer. So, I scheduled the tweetdeck’s updates at a 5 minute interval. Big mistake! If I was lucky enough to read all the tweets before the next update, I had only 1-2 minutes to continue my work before the next one! Afterwards, I decided to read some tweets every couple of hours. It was ok, until I started to follow 250 users. There is no way to keep track of all those tweets! Of course, you need to follow to be followed, but I don’t think that anyone that follows 1000 users reads the tweets of even 100 of them (unless this is what he’s doing for a living). So, what’s the point?

There is very interesting information in there, but I have to spend at least 2-3 hours per day to read everything that interests me. In my twitter month, I stopped reading forums or exploring blogs that I like because I didn’t have the time anymore; twitter sucked it all!

My solution? I should either reduce the number of the users that I follow, or keep all of them (and even add more) creating a separate group of 30-50 users whose tweets I will actually read and interact with. But, isn’t it hypocritical?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject!

Drawing by ~SpoonLV on deviantART

  • http://www.pageaffairs.com/ Ralph

    Similar experience here for the first month or two… but after a while you get used to scanning very quickly and only choosing the very best tweets to follow up on.

    I also recently downloaded a nice Firefox add-on called TooManyTabs, which allows you to save pages just above your tab bar until you are ready to read them. That way, you don’t have to bookmark etc. (They don’t disappear when you shut down, either…) TooManyTabs is certainly worth a look.

  • Stathis

    I’m gonna try the add-on, seems very interesting! Thanks :-)

  • DariaM

    I don’t think there is a way to read all tweets! It’s quite impossible for me. I just read what has been said at the time I log in and I also try to read as many tweets I can from people that share with me the same interests! I ‘ve seen people following more than 1,000 and I’m sure they can’t read every single tweet! So keep your followers to a normal number and try to read people that you ‘re interested in.

  • http://maryhamilton.co.uk Mary Hamilton

    I found it really daunting at first, but now (about two months in) I’ve had a bit of a perspective adjustment which has made things much easier.

    Instead of thinking of Twitter as a series of important statements – like a blog – think of it more as a chatroom, or something like Facebook status updates. It’s not necessarily important to catch up on what’s happened while you were gone, or even to follow everything that’s going on right now – just drop in and out, pick up what you’re interested in when you’re there, but don’t worry over much about what’s going on when you’re not.

    A lot of people will reiterate things at more convenient times for you, and it’s worth keeping a closer eye on the people you really interact with, but if you try to follow everything you’ll overload very quickly. Thinking of Twitter as a constant conversation that I can dip into whenever it’s convenient or necessary has really helped me get to grips with it.

  • Stathis

    Thanks for your comments. I like the idea of the chatroom and i think this is the way i’m gonna try to use it from now on.