PSA for my twitter friends

Ways to avoid my personal Fail Whale (muting/blocking/reporting/unfollowing)

I was going to tweet this, but it would have taken up over three tweets & my friends and I have an agreement that anything over three tweets is a blog post.

MHO (My Humble Opinion for you longhand readers) on rules for twitter. Take them for what they are worth (free!), but know that I am not alone.

• If it takes more than 3 tweets to make your point – it’s a blog post! (see above) 🙂 Seriously, the point of twitter is to say something about what you are doing or to drop some wisdom on a current topic in less than 140 characters. When you launch into a long winded rant, you’ve missed the point. Also, it’s nearly impossible to follow it properly unless I click out of my main time line & go on your page individually. You see, I follow a few hundred people & they are all pretty yappy. You launch into a rant on bad customer service and in between I’ve clicked on an interesting link, a cool twitpic & I’ve laughed at some clever hash tag threads. I’ve long since tuned out your point.Trust me. Blog it! **The ONLY exception to this is @WestWingReport who sends along fascinating This Day In Presidential History posts which often take up over 3 tweets. He crafts them well enough that they can also stand alone effectively**
• Do NOT fill my time line with enormous FF posts! Heck, I’m pretty much over FF altogether. For the uninitiated, FF started out as Follow Friday. It now also means Friend Follow and it’s way to recommend interesting or new twitter people. It was a great way in the early days of twitter to introduce people and to fill your time line with like minded tweets, but now three years in (almost four for me!), my time line is pretty much filled thankyouverymuch. When you send a post that starts with #FF and is followed by tons of @ screen names, I’ve scrolled right on past & if you do it too much, you are muted.
• If you want to do FF right – send ONE name at a time, and just a few on any day. With a quick description as to WHY. @Barantunde does this best. He sends out about 5-10 single FF posts and tells you just enough about who he is recommending to make you look.
• Related to FF – if you spend all day sending tweets thanking each & every person who sent a FF recommendation about you – and you post that in your main feed by either putting a . in front of the @, or by burying the @ in the middle of the tweet, STOP IT!! (it looks like this: “Thanks for the FF @xyz! You rock!”) Really, stop the bragging about how many FF recommends you get. No one else cares!
• If all you do is ReTweet, I’m outta there.
• If half of your tweets are from Blip.fm, I’m outta there. (ditto foursquare & just about any other 3rd party application).

Feel free to add your own complaints 🙂 Mine are somewhat driven by the fact that I read exclusively on my iPhone. The screen holds, at most, 3-4 tweets before I have to scroll and if any of the above is happening, then it’s just like being spammed & I have less patience for it.

Notice I didn’t complain about people posting boring “Lunchtime” tweets like some others do. I like those 🙂 For whatever reason, I get a kick out of imagining what all my tweeps around the world are doing. A voyeuristic glimpse into your day. Just don’t spam me with mass #FF, RT’s & Blips & we’ll be cool 🙂

Happy Tweeting!