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OK, we just wanted to have a little fun with this week’s Overflow Podcast. We recorded late on Friday afternoon, coincidentally the day after Twitter got hammered by a DDos attack.
We had decided earlier in the week that we were going to talk about the types of tweets that we could do without. Tweets that are not relevant, add debris to the stream and could simply be eliminated. Using Friendfeed this week, where there are terrific conversations held in real time, in an easy to follow interface, simply reinforced the amount of junk floating in the Twitter stream. It’s Twitter flotsam and jetsam.
We’ve always seen Chris Brogan say that a great blog post is to make lists .. so here is our list of the types of tweets that we have to navigate around and cause us to lash out .. or maybe not lash out but basically just unfollow.
Are you someone who puts these tweets out into the stream?
- Twittascopes – please, save your horoscope for the funny papers.
- Multiple autoposts, all at once using services such as AutoTweets, Twitterfeed, Proxifeed, and the myriad of other automated ways to send out a tweet. If you must do this please try to spread out the timing of these messages because we skip them when they appear all bunched together in the stream.
- Auto re-tweet services where users of the service are automatically sending retweets of all the others within the network, no matter the relevancy of the message.
- The person who posts mudslinging comments in the political arena. If all you can do is be insulting it’s time to unfollow.
- Tweets that “Guarantee 400 Followers per day!” …. Here is the sarcastic post that Chris Brogan did about this recently.
- Any twitterer who starts with the use of term BREAKING NEWS before every tweet. Nice try but it’s not going to work more than a couple of times.
- The misdirection quote .. inserting an inspirational quote with a link back to a book or sales program is not cool.
- The unfortunate DJ party on Blip.fm while following on the iPhone. Not an issue with the twitterer themselves, just a technology / Apple issue. There are great Friday night DJ’s on Twitter who would be awesome to listen to, unfortunately not on an iPhone.
- And dare we say it .. we love all of the #followfriday props that we get from friends and followers, but it’s run its course. The original purpose of promoting interesting people for others discover was noble and important early on, however it has now gone overboard and has lost its impact. There is a right way to recommend someone and there is a wrong way to do Follow Friday. Let’s just call a timeout and find something new that we can do.
Well, that’s our list. We avoided the well documented auto-dm and sponsored tweets, but we’d love to know if you have tweets that you just can’t stand in your tweet stream. Let us know in the comments what we have missed .. we’ll amend this list and give you credit!
The opening and closing theme for the Overflow Podcast is called The Information Age, by Anthony Fiumano and you can find it at the Podsafe Music Network.
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