
Ricky Gervais quits 'pointless' Twitter - prat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/15/ricky-gervais-quits-pointless-twitter
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david927
Twitter is a mullet. It's not just a fad, but a fad that will embarrass us
later.

~~~
icey
Once I got to the point that I had my follow list well tuned for my tastes,
Twitter became a very valuable source of information for me. The trick has
been to be ruthless with unfollowing people if they dirty my Twitter stream
with stuff that distracts me or irritates me. (It's also helpful to be on the
lookout for anyone to add who might add value to the stream.)

~~~
thesethings
This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune
your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about
what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates?

And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to:

Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers,
doesn't mean you should follow them.

When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the
writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work
and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the
following reasons:

* They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.)

* They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to _hear_ it all the time.

* They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely.

Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine
in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.)

Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.

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jimfl
A lot of people should quit 'pointless' Twitter. Each time that happens, it
becomes more useful to the rest of us.

~~~
david927
I agree -- it's the "anti-network effect". Twitter will finally be most useful
at its limit of zero.

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prat
I keep my eyes open for anything that looks like a toy - and this did
([http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-
start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-
looking-like-a-toy/)). But in my case it wasn't sticky enough.

So just like Ricky I ended up abandoning it. Maybe it works for really well
networked and extrovert people but is not a universal utility by any means.

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VMG
Karl should twitter

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Semiapies
Personally, I've never been interested in twittering to the world or reading
hundreds of tweets a day. I just use it to keep up to date with a few friends.

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wendroid
I don't have any nails, therefore all hammers are pointless.

~~~
elblanco
I need a hammer, and I can only hammer on each nail no more than 2 times.

