Using Twitter Without Going Insane
Sometime in 2008, I overdosed on Twitter.
I’d started using the service during its first early swell of popularity in the electronic frontier world and made the mistake of indiscriminately following way too many people. Every few minutes, a productivity pummeling batch of inane babble, awesome links, witty repartee and auto-generated cruft would crowd into my Twitter client. With my attention fragmenting into the tiny cracks left between email notifications, aggregator notification, Twitter notifications, IRC chatter, IM messages and calendar notifications, I retreated. I unsubscribed from most mail lists, uninstalled my feed reader, closed many of my online service accounts, shut off Skype, Adium and X-chat and then settled back to enjoy the resulting peace.
It didn’t last. Late in 2008, Mark Surman asked me to try using Twitter again – just with a few people as a kind of virtual Mozilla Foundation water cooler. I gritted my teeth, created an @mozak account and revived my @zak account on identi.ca.
A few weeks passed and with a more careful choice of whose Twitterings I followed, I found that I actually liked using Twitter. It was a channel for the small joys and sorrows that matter, but that people feel uncomfortable emailing or calling about. I knew when my friends were blue, when my colleagues were under the weather and when it was MFBT (which of course stands for Most Friendly Beverage Time.)
However, as the group of people that follow me gets more diverse, it is harder to stay on message. Most of my Twitter followers don’t really want to know the banal details of my existence (eg. “Running late”, “Going to the office” or “Bored. Seeing how many paperclips I can fit into my nose..”) and strangers who just want to keep up with my Mozilla work don’t really want to read chunks of the conversations with my friends (eg. “@friend I’m sorry you’re having a crappy day! *hug*” )
To remedy this, I’m am going to try using three different Twitter/Identi.ca accounts: one personal, one about my Mozilla work and one for the virtual teams that I am a part of.
Now I just have to figure out how to elegantly manage all of these accounts. 
The Using Twitter Without Going Insane by , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 20:02
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January 31st, 2009 at 19:41
You’ll actually go more insane managing multiple accounts. Remember: all of these services you use for YOU … not for Them(tm). So, if you need an outlet somewhere to post “I’m bored”, “I’m tired”, or “Man, I wish I had some of @bmann pulled pork right now” … that’s OK.
That being said, I actually do have two accounts. One is my “everything” account, the other is my food blog.
Anyway, let us know how it goes.
February 5th, 2009 at 02:23
[...] Using Twitter Without Going Insane (zak.greant.com) [...]
February 5th, 2009 at 05:57
Hey Zak, long time no see!
I only recently started using Twitter and I still fail to see most of its usefulness. Why’d I start twittering? I was on a concert/mini-festival and wanted to keep those left home (essentially, the lady) up to date what was going on. That said, I really like that use case – micro blogging about what you feel might be interesting during a certain event.
Still, I’m not really convinced that Twitter is for me. For all those status and health updates and the little things à la “submitted a paper today, getting a beer now”, I prefer IRC and ICQ. For anything bigger, I’d rather blog…
February 5th, 2009 at 11:46
Hey Chris!
If our friends are uniformly geeky, then IRC can be a decent option (as long as you have an SMS to IRC gateway). However, I’m not going to get my mum sitting on an IRC channel all day. She does now Twitter, which is totally awesome.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:40
Heh, the geekiness cannot be overstated on IRC. But I have only recently noticed how productive IRC can be if used right – and by “right” I don’t think about hanging around in 20 PHP channels
Anyway, an additional thing about Twitter that caught my eye was that it’s more and more used for things that are not inherently “twittering”. E.g. there is a couple time management / booking systems like mike.yo.lk (german only i think) that allow status updates via twitters. That is just nifty, especially with a mobile phone app (I have twitterific for my iPhone).
I might end up sticking to it after all…
February 6th, 2009 at 03:42
I think a multiple account approach is a great idea. Gives a degree of separation between your personal comments and the more business ones.
You might not want all your clients knowing you are busy getting drunk on a monday afternoon but would be fun to share with your mates busy at work.
February 7th, 2009 at 19:38
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