Cope With It

Okay, I’ve been out there, Twittering away. I thought it was a great idea. I’ve got it going to my IM client, my cell phone and have even played around with a couple of dedicated Twitter client programs for the desktop. But lately, I’m not so sure.

I’ve experienced a couple of problems over the last few weeks that have cooled my enthusiasm, and I’m not talking about the recent outages. The first was a situation where I texted in to follow someone, and then in the next 8 hours (while I was sleeping) received no less than 450, yes four hundred fifty, text message updates to my phone from this individual’s incessant twittering. I’m glad I have a very high texting plan on my cellphone. The majority of this person’s twittering was, well to call it inane would be giving it far too much credit. It was pointless. All this to waste a large percentage of my monthly quota of text messages.

I found that the track keywords function was handy, I wanted to keep up on information on a couple of different topics, and found that tapping into the power of the crowd I was able to do so. But lately, the crowd is letting me down. The signal to noise ratio is dropping like a rock. I received yesterday no fewer than 10 messages containing TinyURL links that all pointed me to the same story, one that had been front paged on Digg, and well, not even that useful at any level in my opinion.

I’ve also come to think that some of the people raving on about twitter are caught up in the shiny new toy aspects of it. I keep hearing about how its “the virtual water cooler”. That may be true, but if so, its the water cooler in the psychiatric ward. Where when you walk up to it, all you hear is half of every conversation going on. People talking to empty space. I see it more as the “meet and greet” session that usually happens at conferences. Where everyone gets together in a huge space and you try to find someone to talk to with similar interests and expectations. You can hear bits and pieces of conversation around you, but you tend to lose the context because you can’t hear the whole thing.

I wonder if Twitter switched to a paid service if the signal to noise ratio would go back up. I think having a barrier for entry like that would keep much of the inane noise down. Another option would be for the Twitter developers to add a rules based spam filter of sorts to the site. Such that the users could have a much finer grained set of controls over what gets through to them. Maybe even set it up such that based on the scores coming out of the filters the message can be routed to different locations. Something that barely passes, and might still be questionable would be routed only to the web interface. Something more solid would go out the IM client or dedicated client. And finally something scoring very well could be routed via SMS as well.

As things currently stand, I’m going to be backing off on it some, there are a few people I follow who i will still allow updates through from, but for the most part, I will stop all the tracking and such. I’m just tired of the noise.