socialmedian: Now Trending On Twitter: Mass Unfollowing

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Now Trending On Twitter: Mass Unfollowing

Source: Steve's shared items in Google Reader

Aug 03, 2009

Summary

It’s not something that will likely place on Twitter’s (largely redundant and abused) trending topics feature, but we’re now starting to see what I think will increasingly become a major focal point for all serious Twitter users over the next few weeks and months – network optimisation.

Robert Scoble is doing it. Chris Brogan is doing it (at the moment he’s no longer auto-following, but he’ll have to unfollow thousands to eliminate his spam problem). Jesse Stay is writing about it.

Why? Because Twitter simply doesn’t work when you follow thousands and thousands of people. This kind of madness leads to:

Direct message abuse (so much spam that using the system becomes folly)

Too much noise in your stream, and because of this

It’s too difficult to filter out the good stuff, which means

You end up not actually following anybody at all

Groups and userlists in external apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop help, but if you’re filtering your network down to a small number and focusing entirely on that, why are you even following the people who do

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Comments (3)

Cjbart,

Aug 05, 2009

This a Truism that has been evident since Twitter's inception. I do not believe any relationships..
and that is the premise i assumed
can be generated with Large Impersonal Numbers

Infodiva,

Aug 05, 2009

I have known this for years.

Rjcortez,

Aug 05, 2009

I wrote about this back in March. My solution was to have multiple accounts for specific topics. It's been working pretty well for me.

Pressing Reset On Social Media – Time For Segmentation
http://allalaskans.com/mysticventures/2009/03/08/pressing-reset-on-social-media-time-for-segmentation/