Friday, May 21, 2010

Friendly Friday: Create a Leaner TwitterStream

How many times have you opened your TwitterStream and discovered that it's overloaded with extraneous Tweets? I did, but now I've narrowed that group to those I want to follow no matter if they reciprocate.

Some of these are Tweets of people who once followed you, yet don't any more. There are a variety of reasons why people stop following you, but the most annoying are those that friend you until you friend them back. When you friend them back, they unfriend you. I don't know anyone who hasn't had this happen.

It's understandable when people unfriend me because they follow me on Plurk or a similar network. I usually go ahead and reciprocate. I unfriend them on Twitter. In the past this has been a bit difficult, but I've found a very helpful Twitter application to help with this process.

Using Friend or Follow helps me sort through those people or organizations and decide who I will continue to follow or unfollow. Another positive aspect of Friend or Follow is that I can use it to find anyone who follows me, that I don't know about. I want to follow people who share interests with me.

In Friend or Follow, you can sort the followers, nonfollowers and friends  by username or several other categories. I used this application to reduce those who don't follow me on Twitter.

I pared this group down to those that I will follow even if they don't follow me.

For instance, I follow Howard Rheingold, but he doesn't follow me. He is very generous and always responds to questions that I've asked him in the past. I will continue to follow him. I follow Starbucks, but they don't follow me on Twitter. That's OK, because we are friends on Facebook.

I used a fairly strict rubric that works for me. Each person needs to develop their own list or reasons for following or unfollowing, and Friend or Follow can help you decide by showing you a list of those who follow, don't follow or mutually follow you on Twitter.

1 comment:

nisha said...

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