Twitter rules

Monday is the busiest day of the week for me, and this particular Monday comes after my busiest week of the young semester. I am still catching up (and probably will still still be catching up come morning in a few hours). WordPress has a new update, something is broken in our blog theme that keeps IE browsers away, and I have 8 hours of work for a 6-hour window of opportunity. Yet the thing I find myself responding to is Robert Scoble’s Twitterquette rant from yesterday, courtesy a post from WebNewsPro.

Lists of dos and don’ts are rarely appealing, but I have been following some of the discussions about guidelines emerging from the relative social chaos that is the Twitter stream. Whereas some are interested in rules for tweet stream management—a self-prescribed regulation that tries to keep the information meaningful—Scoble’s list is largely about the pain one may cause to others:

1. Never send more than 140 characters.
2. Never Tweet more than five times a day.
3. Never follow more than 300 people.
4. Never follow anyone who isn’t your “real” friend.
5. Don’t assume other people are having the same experience you are.
6. Don’t post thoughts across multiple Tweets
7. The Twitter question is “what are we doing?”
8. Follow one person for every 10 who follows you.
9. If other people are telling you you’re spamming, you should listen to them.
10. Don’t put things into Twitter that aren’t designed for Twitter like photos, audio, etc.

This list was published mostly as an example of what Scoble doesn’t do. As the Twitter community continues to grow, however, it is inevitable that social forces will try to exert regulation from some corner.

Some of the above rules are non-sensical, from my experience with Twitter and how it interacts with the other things I do or do not do (i.e. post Flickr photos). Many echo my personal view of what makes my tweet stream meaningful, which is more of the Rands in Repose guidelines for information management. Although I do reply to others—especially when that person is specifically requesting information—I don’t believe Twitter as a substitute for chat. Not only does @-posting tend to clog up the stream, but because everyone sees things a bit different, even in tight social circles, extended conversation on Twitter quickly loses its cohesion. My own limit is typically one public reply and the rest through direct messages. I do send my blog RSS through Twitterfeed, but I spare everyone from seeing links to all my shared posts from Google Reader.

That said, I routinely violate the “Never Tweet more than five times a day” commandment with regular activity throughout the day, limited only by my access to Twitterrific on my laptop. No apologies there, although I do empathize with anyone following me who gets tired of knowing when I am off to read to my boys each night. My main audience comprises of Makices, and composing a short update or interesting reference in my natural moments of pause is a way I can let Amy be connected to my day (and vice versa).

I think the most important item in the list is Rule #5, or more precisely, the corollary to it: Everyone has a different experience with Twitter. We each craft that experience when we decide who to follow, what we post, and how we choose to see the results. Ultimately, the burden is on the follower, not the followed, to either communicate dissatisfaction or choose to adjust her stream.