I follow a very specific philosophy of connecting with people on the internet. That means I want to connect, but not everyone does. As far as I can tell, my breaking point is following 300 people. Beyond that, Twitter is *only* a tool for publicity and random narcissism for me.

But not everyone agrees. Some people follow 16000, 25000, or even 100,000 twitterers. To me, it’s like this: we’re on the phone, but instead of a conversation, I just sit and listen to you talk. It’s one-way communication in a two-way age. “follow *everyone* who follows you.” The problem is, they don’t want to know me, and I don’t want to know them. So it’s mutually assisted narcissism.

Not only that, *my* tweets go from valuable to them, to spam as well! Can you see how good content becomes spam so quickly? Spam is quietly threatening Facebook, Twitter, and basically all of social media. But unlike email, you can actually fix it!

Ok, that’s the end of my three post rant on spam. I really just think it’s valuable to clean up your digital life.

Digital Spam is like a disease. It’s the “Signal/Noise” principle. as the noise increases, it gets much more difficult to even detect the signal you were hoping for in the first place! I want to hit some quick areas spam has killed me, and hear from ya’ll.

• Twitter: I like Twitter. A little bit. I want to go through all the tweets on my front page, and rank them, scale of 1-5(high) based on how much I like the tweeter, and the content of the tweet:
  3, 5, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 2, 5, 1, 2, 5, 1, 3, 3, 5, 2, 3, 1. Averaging a 2.3. My hope is to get it to a 3.6, I’m not sure how that’s going to happen. For an idea, see my last post
• Facebook: Now I love Facebook, but let’s do the same thing, except this time I’m *just* ranking how well I know these people.
  2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 4, 0, 2, 5, 0, 2, 0, 0, 5, 2, 3. Averaging a 2.1. I simply don’t know a lot of these users.
  and Notifications as well! a bunch of them have *nothing* to do with what I care about.
• Google Reader: No ratings now, just the simple fact that about 1/3 of the posts I read (and write probably) are recycled, or simply dull.

Now the solution. Whenever you sign up for a new service, your first question is always: “how do I maximize the information I take in.” The answer is: Unsubscribe, Unfollow, and Unfriend. Do what’s necessary to connect with the people you take information from, and if they’re not interested, hit the button.