Inverting the Long Tail: Why Selective Unsubscribe Can Be Key to a Good Twitter Experience
Purges are never pretty, but I just conducted one — and the results were a surprise.
When I signed up for Twitter last Spring, I figured I’d go ahead and reciprocally subscribe to updates from just about anyone who subscribed to mine. It’s neighborly, right? And that way I’d also get a broader initial exposure to the Twitter community than if I only connected with people I already knew. Pretty quickly, it seemed that twitterers were using the site in three primary ways — as a micro-blogging tool (“Just got to work — Mondays suck”), as an online community (“@bobdobbs great idea! I’ll bring the beer”) and as a broadcast tool/rss replacement (“new article up — http://www.tinyurl.com/blah”). I also found that I was using it mainly to push out article teasers and to follow other author/aggregators, and only somewhat as a community (very rarely as a micro-blog).
7 comments November 24th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
