I’m approaching my 10,000th entry, or Tweet, on Twitter. I have a little over 400 to go before I hit that milestone. As I pondered this, as I do every few days, a new thought occurred to me: maybe 10,000 is enough. Maybe I should quit Twitter at 10,000 and say “good enough, then.” After all, that’s a lot of Tweets. And, if I really wanted to, I could probably hit that milestone in a day or two if I worked at it for several hours per day.
Then I thought: if I’m setting an upper limit, this means that I have a finite number of Tweets to use. How would I use them wisely?
This is the type of thought that most people NEVER have when using social media. After all, the sky’s the limit, right?
Social media, Web 2.0, the modern Internet – it’s all about abundance. There are few limits on what you can do, what you can say, and who you can connect with on the Internet. The only price you need pay is your time. Otherwise, you can create as much content as you want, whenever you want.
I think this abundance could be a problem. Or an opportunity, if we think creatively about it.
When we can generate dozens or hundreds of entries per day with a Twitter account, what happens to the value of a single Tweet? It’s true that some communications have more value than others if we send helpful, useful, or at least entertaining links to our network of Twitter users, blog readers, or Facebook Friends. And heck, if we’re feeling generous and ambitious we can spit out all kinds of useful information in a matter of minutes.
Here’s the problem, though.
Who can keep up with it all? More importantly, who will bother to keep up with it all? Especially if they know that there’s plenty of more Tweets coming from you soon.
Maybe a little bit of scarcity would do us all some good these days.
Why write 20, 40, 100 Tweets or more a day? No one will keep up with them all. Why not just write one? You can even cheat if you want and put a link in your Tweet to a web page or blog post that contains all of the myriad goodness that you want to share with the world.
Some of you will argue that this kind of thinking ignores the conversational nature of applications like Twitter and FriendFeed, which allow you to broadcast, share, and converse with many people in a single stream. Each bit of connection takes a Tweet, an IM message, an E-Mail, or a post of some kind. But which is more valuable: saying hi to 3000 people today or having useful, in depth conversations with two of them?
The advantage of a Twitter or FriendFeed is that it’s a single place where you can accomplish a whole lot of communication and sharing (FriendFeed trades ease of use for more functionality; it also has a much smaller userbase than Twitter). There are plenty of ways to search and filter our output so that people can only see the parts that they want to see. But, it’s still jumbled together in the same stream and the more that you share in a period of time, the more work you create for your followers.
There’s a tendency for bloggers, micro-bloggers and social media users in general to do MORE. To write MORE. To share MORE. Does this mean that everything is of equal value to everyone who follows our stuff? Of course not. It seems like we share a wide variety of stuff on the Web with the hopes that our followers will at least find one or two useful and interesting items, much in the way that record companies, book publishers, and magazine editors release a variety of content in the hopes that at least some of it will find a sizable audience. Much like a fisherman with multiple nets or fishing lines, they’re putting a lot of stuff out there at once, hoping to catch at least some fish. And hey, it certainly works for a lot of fishermen: that’s why they do it.
But, when everyone’s a fisherman and everyone’s fishing in the same spots, they’re still competing over the same number of fish. But hey, if the gear’s free, why not, right?
How about the opposite question, though: why do it? Have we forgotten to question or at least examine the abundance of the Free Web?
If you knew you only had 400 Tweets left, how would you use them? Once you figure that out, try removing that restriction. Maybe it would make sense to look at each Tweet as your last: wouldn’t you use them more wisely? And wouldn’t that be a benefit to you, and your followers, right now?
Nice post Mark and the idea that 'abundance' isn't necessarily a good thing provides some food for thought (thanks).
interesting…
I'll be watching, Steven!
I often think of it.
Every time someone pumps their streams from ones service to another, the stuff get restored somewhere. On individual level it's not noticeable, but in reality huge data centres are needed that have a big impact on energy use.
So perhaps it is a “false abundance”.
The thing is, as long as it's not too many it's not too much. I'll read every tweet that comes my way, but I'll get annoyed when people keep RTing stupid things. Besides that, there's really no difference in my eyes if someone tweets once a day or once an hour.
The quality of the tweeting has far more to do with their worth than the frequency. So just make sure you keep the re-tweeting to a minimum, and try to mention things that say 'you'.
Media Hacks said it best when they said “Twitter is Scaleable, YOU are NOT!”
What happened to conversation? When many of us started Tweeting, we used it like microFacebook, updating people we knew. Now, it's business. It's media. It's a bit nuts, trying to make sense of one-shot snippets from nano-advertisers I'm following in reciprocity because that's what twitter is for… Now. It's not what many of us signed up for, but there's no escaping evolution. It's actually sort of awesome, watching the usage of such a simple thing change so rapidly.
Good point, hadn't thought about the energy usage.
Ah yes, the RT. Good point, that certainly adds to the clutter.
It does make me wonder if there's a need for a purely conversation based application, kind of like Plurk tried to be or that FriendFeed doesn't do as well as some would like.
The trouble is that Twitter tried to be this, I think. Or had the potential. But as soon as it got big, it got exploited. Aside from instant messenger clients, how could one build a culture around small, intimate conversation that, at the same time, somehow manages to be persistant like Twitter or Plurk? And, ow to make it big enough that it's got culture, but keep it on-focus to avoid spam? It's a ver hard line to walk.
Actually, I think the biggest problem is that it's what people are expected to do. I'll keep an eye on my new followers (I block spammers), and there'll be some I really have no clue about. They're basically spamming, but they seem like real humans. It's like Twitter is for SEOs and internet marketers.
The only way to fix that is for Twitter itself to crack down on spam, and send the message that it's not okay to do. The question is, do they want to? It's not a simple question.
Haha, conflicted on this point. I agree that too many straight-up RTs (straight up = no little personal touch or opinion added in front of the RT
) drive me nuts on an individual level. That said, when aggregated RTs carry valuable information since they are basically a new way to “digg” an idea, link or whatever information that tweet contains… or even the person that is being retweeted.
No question that RTs can have some value, but even if they are all good, dozens of RTs are overwhelming.
Thanks for stopping by!
[...] few weeks ago I wrote a little post called What would you do with your last Tweets? Here’s one of the key thoughts from that [...]