My apple: Up and down with Twitter

Like so many of you I am on Twitter (twitter.com/mnystedt) as is Shufflegazine (twitter.com/shufflegazine) and CENTIMETERCUBE (twitter.com/centimetercube). I started my Twitter journey sometime early in 2008 but I got off track for a long time when the Twitter web site and the service was blocked in the UAE. Once the block was lifted my twittering really took off and as 2008 turned into 2009 I was twittering more and more, to the point that it was taking serious amounts of time, time I should really spend on other things.

I love Twitter for many reasons but one is that it’s immediate. Post a tweet and as long as some of your followers are online at the same time, chances are you’ll get a tweet back. I also like the 140-character limit. Short messages are easier to keep up with but harder to post, I think.

When CENTIMETERCUBE (www.centimetercube.com) was moving into a new office in February of this year we ended up not having Internet in the office for over a month. We had ordered the new connection but due to some events out of our control it wasn’t installed for a long time. And even though I can admit that in some aspects it was nice not to have internet it was also really disruptive to our work processes, especially the Shufflegazine one.

One effect us being without Internet had was that my tweeting was really disrupted as well. I kept tweeting some with my iPhone and by using a 3G modem in the office, but I didn’t have a Twitter client running on my Mac all the time as I was used to.

And this was nice for a while. I kind of felt like I didn’t miss Twitter much. That was until we got Internet connected in the office and I could get tweeting all the time again. Now I am tweeting again although perhaps not as much as I was before. And there is one main reason for that, the problem with keeping up with larger number tweeters. I’ve passed 1000 followers and I follow about twice the number so combined there are a lot of tweets that scroll by in my Twitter client. There are too many to keep up with anymore. I used to quickly scroll through all the tweets and reply to many of them. Now I simply can’t do that.

To deal with this I’ve resorted to almost only look at mentions and private messages. And the silly thing is that it makes me feel bad that I don’t check everybody’s tweets, I feel guilty in a way. But I also know, that if I did check all tweets, I wouldn’t have time for much of anything else. Basically I do the only thing practical at this point.

With Ashton Kutcher (twitter.com/aplusk) reaching over 1 million followers I wonder how he really uses Twitter. There is no way he can keep up with all tweets. Even with a small staff it wouldn’t be possible. So either he just filters certain people (friends, family) or certain key words, and only checks the hits, or he does what I do, just check mentions and private messages. But with that many followers even that probably won’t work. Imagine how many mentions he would be in!

Twitter is fun and although I’m not as addicted to as I was at one point I’m still spending a lot of time on it. I’d be interested in how you manage your twittering. For me it’s been up and down as with so many other things in life. Perhaps by sharing some experience we can all benefit.

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