Make Twitter useful Idea #1
This morning I was sitting down to some pancakes and oatmeal, and had this thought:
Twitter is nice. I like it a lot, and use it all the time. They’ve made it very easy to follow someone, but not so easy to unfollow them. Good luck trying to unfollow a bunch of people. The thing is, the cost to follow one useless aggravating spammer is low, but following hundreds of them makes Twitter useless for anything but publicity. Connecting becomes impossible.
So what if a tool was built called “the Chopping Block.” Here’s how it would work.
- You set a cap for most people you intend to follow. Say 250.
- Once you follow the 251st person, the Chopping Block automatically kicks out the twitterer of lowest value to you.
- This is decided by their spam-value, if you’ve ever @ed them, their follower/followed ratio, length of time on twitter & following you etc.
So using all these factors, you slowly bump off the annoying tweets, while adding high value people that you enjoy. At the same time, it’s painless, and makes for a better experience.
Ok, this doesn’t exist yet…as far as I can tell…let’s make it happen.
Tags: chopping block, Twitter, unfollow
Posted on Wednesday, October 21st in Best Practices.
Interesting idea…I'd be scared that I'd lose a person who I actually wanted to follow, but I doubt that would be a huge problem.
I like the idea. But like Steven said, there's a risk in losing people you actually want to follow. Maybe, you could have like a manual override and keep people you want to follow, even if the application/plugin/doohickey thinks they're not of high enough value.
absolutely. Maybe a weekly email w/ the people you've unfollowed would be in order.
But last week I was unfollowing people, and I found 80 low value tweets I'd followed but didn't care about one bit. That's 20%! If somehow an algorithm could distinguish between those guys and the really good tweets, we'd have a heckuva system.
I agree, I think I might do a followup post about the value of killing spam or something.
[...] Make Twitter useful Idea #1 [...]
I like this idea. I am at this point and need to go back through and evaluate who I am following and why.
I heard a story about a guy who had 12,000 followers and was using some kind of tool for twitter. On accident he hit unfollow everyone. He went from following around 10,000 people to no one. That is not the interesting part, the interesting part was when he went back in to start following people again his number of followers dropped to 6,000. He realized that the people he followed had an auto follow feature as well as a auto drop feature. Once he dropped them, they dropped him.
I think that is an example of why following so many people can be really pointless.
Twitter is used for connecting and sharing thoughts, links, etc….not for having 12,000 followers to look important.
solid points.
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