Since Seattle weather has reverted to the mean today (cool & raining), I thought I'd rant a bit about some things about Twitter that I hate.

I don't have a ton of followers or people following me.  It really doesn't bug me because most people I know don't really regard Twitter as an important tool yet.  I'm not sure they ever will.  Of all the Web 2.0 technologies I introduce to people not in the Web 2.0 community, I get the most blank stares about Twitter.  I get feedback along the lines of "why would I want to use that?"  So I guess it bugs me that Twitter is so hard for most normal people to understand… ergo they won't adopt it easily.

I generally have to add Twitter contacts on a one by one basis.  Either I'm looking for someone or they have found me.  I have found Twitter's import feature (scanning Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to be incredibly buggy… moreso than the rest of Twitter.  In fact, I've never gotten it to work.  It goes something like this:

  • We're importing your contacts.  It may take a little longer if you are popular.
  • "Something is technically wrong"  Thanks for noticing—we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

That's quite a bureaucratic definition of "soon."  I feel like I've seen this movie before. ;-)  I just want them to get their shit together.

Now I have 300+ friends on LinkedIn… 95% of which I'd regard as people I know a lot about.  I'd keep up with them on Twitter.  The same goes for Facebook.  Yet I can't import contacts from LinkedIn or Facebook.  Now I don't know if that is even feasible per the TOS for Facebook and LinkedIn.  But it's really inconvenient that I can't see if my contacts on other social networks have Twitter accounts.

Finally, I tried following a few industry pundits on Twitter just to see what they were commenting on/reading/etc.  I followed Arrington, Tim O'Reilly, and Guy Kawasaki for a few weeks.  But the sheer volume of nonsense from them was overwhelming.  In the case of Arrington and Kawasaki, these guys don't share insights on Twitter as much as they continuously pimp their own companies in a neverending dirge of self-serving nonsense.  I don't blame them… if I had their level of celebrity in our industry, I would probably do the same.  But it isn't useful especially since I can't filter Tweets.  I'd probably have kept them if I could just file them away for review say once a week.  It was just too much noise though.  Props to Tim O'Reilly for keeping it real.

If you want to keep up with news stories on Twitter, I recommend you check out Jeremy Bencken's blog post on subscribing to the news alone… I found this contribution to be very, very useful.

You may have noticed that I don't regard advertising as a problem on Twitter… I really don't.  Just know that there are limits, and don't use Twitter for spam or broad announcements 20+ times per day.  It gets old.

Carry on.