By Going through my social media/e-mail fast, I realized how much harder my life is without Twitter.
Many of my digital native peers find the idea of reading what unknown people have for breakfast pointless. However, we like the idea of sharing everything, or almost everything, we do with the world. But we are afraid that Twitter is an invasion of our privacy, although we do give the world a permission to sneak into our lives. Since we can’t find balance between our narcissism and need for privacy, most of us stay away from the Twitterverse.
That used to be me about a year ago until one of my professors convinced me to sign up. I thought “Well, it won’t hurt. Let’s see how it goes. I can always just deactivate it.” So, innocent me dived into the sea of tweets. Little did I know what I was getting into. Soon I became addicted to Twitter and the benefits and opportunities it provides.
I can go on and on about all the great things I’ve gotten through Twitter: an internship, free tickets to a comedy show, a Google wave invite… I got a job because I tweet. I heard, well read, about TNGG on Twitter. (Thank you Stuart!)
All this is great, but it is not why I love Twitter. Twitter is my human filter. I get the world news through Twitter. I get all university news through Twitter. I learn all kinds of totally random and amusing facts through Twitter. I get insights about everything that is of interest to me through Twitter. I get movie reviews through Twitter. I get almost everything I need to know in an easy and quick fashion. Most importantly, I can guarantee you that 98% of all tweets I get provide me with important information. For me Twitter is like a smart Google Reader on steroids. With Google Reader I get a lot that might be interesting to me. With Twitter I get a lot that most likely will be interesting to be because it is filtered by the people I trust to follow. It is one thing to get all the articles from The New York Times through Google Reader. It is another thing to get all relevant to me articles from The New York Times, most of the times with a comment, through Twitter. Before I used to waste hours reading articles half way just to find out I didn’t care or I already knew everything they had to say. Now Twitter saves me enough time to read twice more for the same amount of time.
It is unfortunate I had to realize this only by limiting my Twitter usage. But at least I did realize it.
To all my fellow Millennials: You can read what the world does and it can actually be helpful, interesting and fun.
To all the people I follow: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my life easier.
Addy – in your next post, you need to write about how you filter your filter. Seriously, I follow less than half the number of people you do, and I get overwhelmed by my Tweet stream. I deal with the overwhelm using a private “Must Read” list (under 20 ppl on the list), and basically catch the rest of my stream as a snapshot when I log in from time to time. If I didn't have that list, I'm pretty sure Twitter would be worse than useless to me – I can only imagine what it's like for people who auto-follow back.
Adam,
I get overwhelmed sometimes too.
How I filter it? Well, I use HootSuite to check Twitter and it is very helpful. I also follow a whole bunch of lists and hashtags that I check once or twice a day. I also have a Twittertim.es (http://twittertim.es/addy_dren) , which is my Twitter newspaper and it puts together the posts the people I follow talk the most about. It is pretty much based on what gets tweeted and retweeted the most. I hope that helps.
About the people who auto-follow, I don’t think their main purpose is to keep up with everything, build relationships and get to know people. But then again you never know…
Thanks for the tip about Twittertim.es, Addy. I might try that out, although I'm pretty strict about my minimalism, which is one of the reasons why I only use Twitter from the web. I've abandoned the clients I used to use (Tweetdeck/Seesmic/Twitterfox(aka Echofon))