Despite all the benefits to Twitter, there are a number of things that irritate me, and take away from the ideal user experience, and I thought I’d share them with you.
First of all, and probably the most irksome of Twitter’s flaws isn’t with the service itself, but in how people use it. Some people are obsessed about the number of followers they have. Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) recently put out a call for more Twitter followers in a bid to reach 1 000 000 in order to surpass CNN. So, he wants publicity. Fine. What about all the non-celebrity Twitter users out there who spend all there energy getting followers? What’s the point?
And then there are the people who follow thousands of other people. How could you possibly keep track of everything all of these people have to say? I look at my Twitter stream, and I see that half of the tweets are replies to people I don’t know. I follow 40 people. I can’t imagine trying to weed through tweets from a couple hundred people, let alone a couple thousands. The signal to noise ration is just way to high on Twitter.
Next, I really can’t stand it when all people tweet about is Twitter. They tweet about how much they love twitter, and tweet "Thanks for Following" when they get a new follower.
The problem comes from those obsessed people in my first point who want to follow and be followed by as many people as possible. Sometimes you’ll see tweets from them recommending dozens of people at a time. When I see this, I just ignore it because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.
And finally, I despise services like Mr. Tweet and Tweetmeme that flood your twitter stream with automated garbage. I also find it irritating when people automatically cross-post from other social networking services like Facebook or Blip.fm. Why do you think that your twitter followers want to know about every song you think is great on Blip.fm? If you want your followers to know about your newest blog post, that’s fine, but your facebook status? I just don’t get it.
Feel free to re-post this on all your social networks, and maybe try following me.
