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.

I'm Here!

Finally back on Utterli, and wanted to say something funny. Hee! Yup! That's it! That is probably as funny as it gets.

Mobile post sent by n2teaching using Utterli.  Replies.

When I began my serious pursuit of professional development in technology education, I was lucky enough to be guided by a remarkable colleague, Jennifer Jones. She was one of the first people to friend me on Twitter, and she was not just looking for more followers or trying to check out the competition. Jennifer truly believes in the power of collaboration and learning through technology education. She is a remarkable technology educator, and she has a wonderful family who share in her passion for learning and having fun.

Twitter was the first microblogging site I joined, so in the fall of 2007 when Jennifer said she was checking out a microblogging site with video and audio capabilities, I decided that I needed to check it out. That is when I joined UTTERZ. Also, I joined Susan Tsairi another wonderful online colleague, and we began to use Utterz. Also, I put the really cool UTTERLI widget at the bottom of this blog.

This was also about the time that my teen began to see that I now had a significant online presence. I never really knew how that was perceived by my child, but I gathered the word "nerd" and "geek" were synonymously replacing my name whenever the teen and friends would discuss my move to online professional development. Well, no one can say I am not a thorough student.

I was very excited about the possibilities of using UTTERZ, but even dedicated students such as myself can succumb to family relational pressure. I stopped sharing my online professional development experience with the teen when I was asked if I would be using Twitter and Utterz, and it was sadi in such a way that I had to laugh at the interesting, yet nonsensical names of the various educational networks I joined.

Fortunately, UTTERZ changed their name to UTTERLI, and I greatly appreciate it. To utter on paper is so much different than to utter in conversation, and it began to wear on my traditionalist, farm country sensibilities. THANK YOU!

I love UTTERLI, and the people who make it all happen. They have added conferencing capabilities, cross-posting, desktop applications and many other cool services. Try it! This microblogging/podcasting services is UTTERLI fantastic.

My Plurkadian Tag Cloud

Plurk is a microblogging social network that my PLN, Professional Learning Network, uses to collaborate in real time and asynchronously.

A wonderful new feature, is the Plurkadian Tag Cloud. These are very interesting.

I can't wait until there is an rss feed for these Plurkadian analytics.