I may be having a grumpy moment, but a few annoying habits are creeping in on Twitter.
It's inevitable that every new community/system/organisation will develop its problems, things that aren't evident in the early days. I could just 'unfollow' the offenders, but some of them do have valuable things to offer, and besides, if these habits are highlighted then there's a chance someone else might think twice about it.
I'm talking about two things that have really struck me today. One is to do with the #followfriday routine - the idea is to recommend someone you follow and give a reason why you think they're worth following. Some people insist on recommending all their followees, and broadcast a succession of tweets consisting of just lists of names, with no reason for why they are on the list. There have been complaints about this, but to be honest I can live with it.
But what irritates me is people re-tweeting those 'list' tweets, when their own names are on the list. Is this to amplify the effect of the #followfriday? Hardly, since the re-tweeter is tweeting to people who already follow him! In other words it's just showing off. 'Look - I've been recommended in a #followfriday tweet, aren't I great!'
Second annoyance is those 'guru' types who promote every blog post or article they write, then re-tweet the original tweet ad infinitum - same time every day for several days, same time every hour throughout the day. It's not as if they say 'For those who may have missed it...' No. It's a word for word repeat, more than likely auto-retweeted. The tweeter just has to hit a button and it's scheduled to be retweeted as many times as they want.
The result: our already crowded tweet streams get clogged up and we waste valuable time reading tweets we've already read, not to mention missing other more useful tweets.
Enough already! Will the offenders please desist, and if you're a Twitter newbie thinking about blasting out links to your blog posts several times, please remember this is the twitter equivalent of spam, and you will cause people to unfollow you quicker that you can imagine.
