Twitter Purge
After nearly 3 years on Twitter, I’m finally ready to admit that my addiction is over. This past year, my Twitter usage has dropped considerably and at this point, it’s actually almost to the point of being a chore. My former boss, John, has been telling me for years that he’s got ‘social media fatigue’ and that’s why his profiles on each network are mostly empty shells.
With the exception of Facebook and LinkedIn, I now put myself in that camp as well. And even Facebook is only worthwhile at all because more of my friends and family are there than anywhere else. If they all migrated elsewhere, I’d drop FB in a heartbeat, too.
Twitter is still good for research, news, industry awareness for me, but the network as a whole is now too big for me to feel personally about it. People’s individual networks are too large to be able to pay any attention to who says what. And now that I’ve migrated through industries for the 4th time in 2 years (E2.0, online marketing, entrepreneurship, and now back to ecommerce), my network was a jumbled mess.
So I just pruned more than 1000 people from my follow list. And I’ll keep pruning. I think I’ll focus on re-shaping my network a bit, and drop some of the business-specific focus, and pay more attention to people who write about food, dogs, travel and writing. More of my on-going quest to develop some sort of real life outside of work, I guess.
Always a good-sounding idea, even if my reality always manages to fall short.
For now, though, if I just unsubscribed from your Twitter feed, don’t take it personally. It’s about me doing some New Year housekeeping, and acknowledging the finite nature of my time.
