Revisiting Signal to Noise & Twitter

I had quite a lot of feedback from my Signal to Noise Ratio & Twitter post last week.

Most of the feedback was positive and in agreement with my argument that twitter can become something that overloads you with a lot of noise. Some folks disagreed with my argument too…and I’m OK with disagreement.  I welcome it…as long as there’s a reasoned argument behind the disagreement.

I wanted to take a second to revisit my argument for those that disagree with my approach.

First…its the way I use twitter…and it works for me.

Second…if your argument contains the words “absurd”, “stupid”, “dumb” or “you’re doing it wrong”…you need to learn to argue better.  Have a valid, reasonable reason for your argument.

Lastly..there are those that argue that if my twitter stream is too ‘noisy’, then I shouldn’t follow so many people.   That’s a valid argument..but one that isn’t necessarily reasonable.

Why?  Because I have a lot of interests and there are a lot of people out there with those same interests.

For example:

I’m interested in Technology, IT Leadership, Project Management, Knowledge Management, Investing/Trading, WordPress Development, Distance Education, Photography….and much much more.

Now…imagine you follow 25 people in each of these interests you’d be following 200 people.   Once you do any type of interaction with any of those people, you will probably find another 10 to 20 people that are worth following…within a short amount of time you are up to following 500 people.

So…its not quite as easy to ‘only follow a few people’ like those that argued against me following a large number of people.  One of those folks that argued against following a large # of people had 3000 followers and followed only 100 people.  Good for them for figuring out the 100 people that they want to follow…they’ve found a way to keep their stream less noisy.

Me?  I’ve found that lists work best for me.  I can have many interests and follow a lot of really interesting folks but these lists allow me to focus on just a few topics/lists at one time.

That make sense?

Makes sense to me and it works for me.

Oh…and I’m not doing it wrong. I’m doing it my way 🙂