Why Twitter Is Great

For starters, let’s talk about me. I use Twitter in a very specific way. I follow a (relatively) miniscule amount of people (30 at the moment). I read every Twitter post in my feed, every day. I unfollow people I know — friends, coworkers — without hesitation if they flood my feed with tweets by setting their account to auto-post from their blog, or their Last.fm, or their geolocation. I immediately and relentlessly unfollow companies that post filler tweets, or strange “conversation-starters”. When it comes to Twitter, I run a tight ship.

Plenty of folks don’t use Twitter like this. One of my coworkers (who follows around 500 people) describes his Twitter use as “jumping into the stream now and then.” The Twitter folks themselves seem to advocate his usage strategy, rather than mine:

“We believe that following 2000 people is a reasonable limit for the number of people an average person can follow.” - Twitter

I personally think that is crazy talk. But here’s the thing: somewhere, Ashton Kutcher is retweeting Harvard Research; somewhere else, folks have their Last.fm set to autopost every time they listen to a track; somewhere else, an SEO “strategist” is strongarming his way into the Twitter charts by following hundreds of people a day.

And none of that impacts me in the least.

That post from No Reservations might not bother you — if not, great! You don’t have to unfollow them, and I don’t have to follow them. By completely disconnecting the follower/following relationship, Twitter makes it very easy to ignore anything that bothers you. I posit that this is What Makes Twitter Great: you can use it however you like, and the different ways other people might use it don’t impact you.

Why That Doesn’t Matter

Early last week, I posted a simple job notification. At the time, I had around 90 followers.

Within the next day, this had happened:

Now I have 123 followers. Those numbers are probably all very small in comparison to most, but percentage-wise, that’s a 30% increase in followers, all of which were spam (with the exception of two friends in there that followed me for unrelated reasons).

A couple of years ago, when MySpace was past its peak of popularity and on its way down into Spamville, I’d get maybe a dozen fake requests in a week, all from very obviously fake accounts, populated only by a chesty webcam picture and a questionable-sounding link (“LOL Myspace won’t let me post naughty pics so CLICK HERE!!!11”). Spam, clearly. Anyone could tell. The accounts were usually suspended quickly. Eventually, as folks moved to Facebook, my friend requests became exclusively spam. Then even those dried up, and my MySpace account lies dormant.

Twitter has the same problem in a different form. Let’s take one of the accounts that followed me last week. Is @CrimsonIce04 a spam account? It’s not a faceless, fake breasts-and-porn-link MySpace account; it appears to be a real person who posts links to articles. Upon further investigation, most of her articles are hosted at the same website (ArticleManiac.com) — so CrimsonIce04 is just a spam account to drive traffic there — right? Well, maybe not. She also posts links to the Syracuse news, a funny F My Life story, and a LiveJournal post (so it might be from a friend of hers).

So, is she spam? I have no idea. I’m not going to follow her. (2179 people already are.) She could be a real person. She could be a fictional construct that exists to drive traffic somewhere. Who cares, right? I can ignore her (see above section, “Why Twitter Is Great”).

Here’s the quiet, insidious problem: Twitter blurs the line between marketing and spam.

The “spambots” in the world of Twitter are Normal People.

Twitter operates on principles of quantity. The format of Twitter encourages this behavior. Users like me can solve the problem for ourselves by simply choosing not to follow folks whom we consider to be spammers, but this practice of ignoring the problem does not make it go away. Twitter is rotting from the inside out

MySpace eventually disintegrated into porn & webcam spam; Twitter will eventually disintegrate into marketing & SEO spam. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter will still exist, but will be a shell of its initial self — a recursive, self-aggrandizing web of false marketing hopes.

And those of us who used Twitter for more modest, personal reasons — conversation, friends, and quick company information — will retreat to Facebook, a service that had the presence of mind to separate company accounts from individual accounts.

(There are 6,565 new tweets about New Moon now.)