Let's Talk About Twitter

Since I seem to do my best work in the early morning hours -- to be more precise, since I tend to post in the early morning hours -- here's a blog post. My original intention (since I keep putting off the posts about the three movies I've seen in the last 2 weeks) was to just write about some random stuff in my head at 2:30 a.m (the time I began this). However, it's turned into a whole Twitter thing.

As of now I follow about 275 Twitter accounts. (I have about 180 followers of my own and am always looking for more, so tell your friends!) While I really like Twitter, there are things about it that I dislike immensely, and it's not posts about the weather or people's lives that some get worked up about -- they see tweets (or Facebook status updates, for that matter) like "Going out to dinner..." as boring. I don't mind them, though. They're little looks into people's lives.

Following 275 accounts, though a few aren't really active at all, it takes time trying to read through the timeline. That makes me want to try and save time by dropping some of those I currently follow. I don't want to unfollow anyone who's following me back, though, and of those who don't follow me back, I always seem to find various reasons to keep them, whether they're really entertaining or just because they're a favorite of mine (like Annie Lennox).

I finally dumped a couple today, one being ESPN's Jayson Stark. Why Jayson?
He posts links to columns that are in the "ESPN Insider" section. That's the content on their site that you have to pay for. Why post a link to tantalize me, only to find I'm blocked because I'm not a paying customer? Besides, I have other Twitter feeds from baseball reporters so I don't think I'm missing anything.


One of my pet peeves is excessive re-tweeting of things I don't care about. It's one thing to re-tweet a humorous post by a celebrity or a link to an interesting article or video. (I do it myself. I don't think I do it excessively.) It's another thing entirely to post insults and other assorted stupidity directed at you from people on the opposite side of your political opinions, sometimes accompanied by your snarky replies. I'm looking at you, Keith Olbermann -- I haven't unfollowed you yet but you're on notice. Reply to them, not me. If I wanted to find out the views of right-wing idiots, I'd follow them myself.

Speaking of replies, if you're doing "@ replies" back and forth with someone, if I follow you both I see both of your posts. If I only follow one of you, I don't see your replies to the other person unless you re-tweet them. If I'm not following them, normally I don't care what you two are talking about, so don't re-tweet them unless there's a damn good reason.

For the sports fans (or sports media, if any of them actually read this, which I kind of doubt but it would be soooooo cool if someone did -- a couple of local reporters who have Twitter accounts actually follow me back): I don't mind game updates, or celebrations of great plays or rants about slumping hitters or bad goaltending or whatever. I don't need them on every single pitch or every single batter if it's not a key point of the game or if nothing really newsworthy is going on. I'm probably watching the game anyway, so I can see for myself what's going on.

Another thing: these Trending Topic subjects like the ones I see tonight, #note2females and #missedcallexcuses -- I don't even know what these are called; you include it in your post and then make a joke or whatever -- they usually get more stupid the more often they're done. Do one or two, if you really have to, and then stop.

Some of the things I dislike are technical in nature. For example, if you move a cursor over the Twitter ID of someone in your timeline, a little box appears displaying their name and some other info. Sometimes, instead of disappearing right away, it stays on my screen for a minute when I'm trying to read what's below it.

Or this quirk: when I'm reading and I get to the bottom of the page I click on "more" to see the next set of posts. I have to do this quite a few times, especially if I've been out all day and haven't been on Twitter at all (either on the computer or on my phone). Sometimes by mistake I click on a Twitter ID -- usually this is when I'm clicking on a link to a website and the page jumps because some new tweets have arrived -- a "x new tweets" line is added at the top and that pushes the rest of the page down a bit, so I end up going to someone else's Twitter page instead of the new window opening up for the link I was trying to click. When I go back to my Twitter home page, I'm returned to the original set of posts. The rest of them are gone, so I have to go back to the bottom of the screen and click "more" over and over again to get back to where I was. I get so frustrated at this.

So, if you're on Twitter, what things do you dislike about it? If you follow me on Twitter, do I do anything that bothers you? If you're on Twitter but don't follow me, why the hell not? And if you're in the sports media (or non-sports media, or if you're a celebrity of any kind, for that matter) and read my blog, please let me know so I can feel like I'm somebody. ;-)