OneMind

Yesterday I got a Twitter notification that someone named tweetlessons had begun following me. Following what I understand to be good Twitterquette, I went to his page and began following him.

In the next several hours I was bombarded by more than 40 Tweets. Ironically, one of them was a pointer to a post asking why so many people leave Twitter within a month of joining. My answer: people like tweetlessons who send out way, way too many Tweets in short periods of time. He’s clearly not the only offender. Several Twitterers that I’d love to follow on my iPhone have fallen off my list of those I follow in real time because they over-did their Tweets.

On Twitter, where only 140 characters can be used in a message, the message is “Less is More.” So why do these self-absorbed egoists insist on burying my SMS mailbox with tens of messages every day, often sending a half dozen or more within a few minutes of one another?

Between that and the tremendous outburst of spam and blatant marketing messages, Twitter is rapidly becoming useless to me. Even one person I really enjoy hearing from — Lightcoaching — sends out far too many messages too close together. Her “wisdom” becomes of diluted value to me when it buries me like that.

So I turn device notification off for these folks. Which essentially means I’m not really following them since I get back to the Twitter site relatively infrequently. So, as I said, overuse of the service results in losing followers. You’d think that someone named “tweetlessons” who presumably wants to teach others to use Twitter effectively wouldn’t make that mistake. You’d be wrong.