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Since attending Podcamp Toronto I’ve had a t witter account. I’ve amassed over 110+ followers but I’m only following about 60 back. Most of my followers aren’t spam bots, so why don’t I reciprocate?

Because we’re likely using Twitter for very different reasons. I see twitter as a way of casually mentioning what’s going on every now and then, and occasionally partaking in very brief conversation that usually doesn’t extend more than two tweets. Anything more and I either blog about it, or email/contact the person directly.

There are two issue with Twitter.

First, Twitter users on the whole will often use it as a god damn instant messenger. There’s nothing I hate more than seeing my tweet wall filled with 20 tweets from the same person within the last 15 minutes. You do NOT need to reply to every single one of your followers with a “Ya @person, that’s nifty!” followed by a “I agree @otherperson!” Once, sure, twice, fine, 15 times? Buy a phone and spend a minute with them.

Second, Twitter’s much lauded awesomeness in terms of its ability to connect the people is fraudulent from what I’ve seen. The average facebook/myspace user does not use twitter. It doesn’t have the functionality they’ve come to expect from their social networking experience. Want to share photos? You can post a link to a flickr/facebook set, sure, but that requires something other than twitter, and that something is more often than not perfectly capable of allowing their users to carry on conversations in groups or one on one. Also, and this is a biggie, Twitter is seen by PR folk as the second coming Christ, and for good reason: it’s mostly PR people who use the damn thing! More than half (I’d wager 3/4) of all the non-spam bot people who’ve followed me on twitter are all PR PR PR. This mostly makes twitter not a social-networking site, but a business/PR-networking site. You do not reach the average person and you don’t reach the tastemakers either if the only people you reach are other people like you (ie. PR PR PR).

As a result the only PR people that I follow back happen to be people I know in some way shape or form, or because they tweet interesting shit.

I’ll throw one last nugget out there: Twitter is the new Digg, in that the only thing people on Twitter talk about is mother fucking TWITTER. It’s down again? BOO HOO! Can’t think of anything tweetable? Don’t tweet “I can’t think of anything tweetable”!!! The video below comes to mind.

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