Twittering Part 4

1) I always hate to admit when I'm wrong, but Twitter's decision to remove the option of seeing "@ replies" from the people who you're following has been a godsend. At the time, I was really annoyed they took it away (and the way they handled it was undeniably horrible), but I've really enjoyed the reduction in tweets.

Granted, there are people whose replies I'd love to see because they'd be of interest to me. But there are also people (mostly pseudo-celebrity media types) who already tweet more than they probably should, and their replies, would just take up more room on my stream than they already do.

2) I almost couldn't even read Twitter during the first few days of the Iranian election protests, because of the sheer amount of self-righteousness emanating from it. Not from the Iranian users, of course, but the American ones. How many times did you see some variation of this re-tweeted?: @CNN You are risking lives for ratings!!!! Stop posting Twitter names!!!!

Uh, no.

Suppose CNN just ran the tweets without the user names. Twitter's search function is amazingly effective. You know how easy it would have been for any Iranian authorities monitoring the situation to use it to find a specific tweet and/or user? Really easy. Or they could have just clicked on the Iranian election hashtag. Or follow all the re-tweets back to their source.

It may be harsh, but the bottom line is, if the protesters didn't expect their tweets to be widely disseminated and possibly be identified by them, they shouldn't have been using Twitter. CNN did nothing wrong. People just like to whine and scream at people they otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I also did a fair amount of eye-rolling at the frantic tweets asking users to change their profile location to Tehran in an effort to fool the Iranian authorities. Not surprisingly, this was soon debunked as being completely ineffective, but not before I saw it re-tweeted a good three dozen times.

I get how some people feel a need to "do something" when it comes to an event like the Iranian protests. Especially since the Internet makes it so easy to feel like you are, even if you're not. And to be fair, some people in this country actually were doing something, like the hackers who created proxies for Iranians to circumvent censors. But otherwise, unless you can do something that would be directly helpful, it really is okay to just stand back and observe. I'd be curious to know how many of the Twitter users who spent that week working up a sweat at their keyboard, tried calling their congressman or donated to some nonprofit dedicated to Iranian reform or basically anything that would have required more effort than simply typing "RT" and cutting and pasting something.

3) Like all Twitter users, I get people who sign up to follow me and then when they see I'm not following them back, they stop. And I'm used to this. But a few weeks ago, I had someone follow me because she genuinely seemed to dig my tweets. And she would reply to them. Fairly often. Probably more than one person should reply to someone. I never replied back, and after a few days, she stopped following me.

I think a lot of Twitter users think of tweets as a conversation, and the problem is, they're not. When X responds to Y's tweet and Y doesn't respond back, it's not like they're actually speaking with one another, and X says something and Y just stares off into space because he's a dick. If someone responds to you, and you honestly can't think of anything to say other than, "Totally!" or "LOL!" is there really a point in responding?

4) I've been seeing a few of these sort of tweets recently: RT This for a chance to win (some prize) from @somecompany! So far, it hasn't really been a problem, but it's not hard to imagine that changing as more and more companies hop on board the Twitter bandwagon.

For these companies, this sort of thing has to be the most appealing way of running a contest ever. It requires no effort whatsoever other than the initial tweet and then picking a winner. All the work is done by other people. Like I said, it's not a big deal now, but sooner or later, Twitter's either going to have to ban this or charge companies for the ability to run such contests, because otherwise, there's going to be a consistent glut of these tweets, and Twitter will be overrun by spam.