How I learned to stop worrying and love twitter

I couldn't resist using this title, but the point of this post is more nuanced. Well, at least what's in my head is more nuanced; now to what extent I'm going to succeed in conveying it... we'll see.

Once upon a time, several months ago, I decided to check out twitter. I was curious, and I overcame my inertia when I heard that there was a vibrant community of climbers breaking new ground in social media. So I started an account under the username "slampoud". Normal, right? I mostly used it to communicate with climbing tweeps, to post announcements of my blogposts on "Little did I know..." (my climbing blog) and "If pressed" (my review blog), and to ruminate. All fine, all within the normal use parameters of twitter.

Except that I found that because of all the indexing, republishing and referencing websites out there, the page rank of my twitter posts was fairly high, and they came to dominate the google search results for "slampoud". Since I'm a UNIX geek, my username is really a professional handle for me. Yet, during that time, if you did a search for "slampoud" you'd get results that included quips about climbing, compliments and gripes about products, and random ruminations about cats and traffic. I found that such search results were disorienting and detracted from my identifiability as a practicing geek.

There was an additional problem. Social media is the new playground for sophisticated folks in product evangelism and promotion. There are companies that do it right, companies that do it wrong, people who do it right and people who do it wrong, as in any field. But by being plugged into the twitter climbing community, by playing by its rules (and there's a fairly delicate, emergent web of RTs) I found that I was being exposed to a lot, way too much, product promotion. Conversely, of course, when it was information about a product that I needed, that information was readily available. Then again, its location next to so much promotion made even useful information suspect.

In a way, I was proud to have slowly gotten the hang of how the thing worked, of who was what to whom, who was worth listening to and who needed to be filtered out, and what the bots and spammers were attracted by. But, also, the situation was becoming slightly ludicrous: if there was someone I felt I needed to filter out, then why not simply drop them from my feed (or "unfollow" them, in twitter-speak)? 9 times out of 10 I felt the obligation not to, sometimes because this was clearly a newb learning the ropes, sometimes because the offender and I were embedded in a network of relationships with others, a network whose balance I didn't want to upset -- both real world reasons applied to an electronic social network of people I essentially didn't know!

So, because I was alarmed at the fact that my professional handle was being overwhelmed by gibberish, and because I was vaguely nauseated by the amount of product promotion that was passing before my eyes, and, finally, because I was put off by the fact that I was applying real world social mores to my twitter-verse, I deleted that account (or thought I had -- turns out twitter keeps them around in case you change your mind, which begs the question: how does one make a fresh start on twitter?). I believe my final tweet was "I am so burned out on this twitter nonsense. Buh bye." I probably used less punctuation, though.

But I'm not a luddite. In fact, more than anything, I find myself mesmerized by twitter, and especially by marketing on twitter, in the same way I'm mesmerized by stock exchange data. You have to admit that to a geek it's fascinating. There are patterns in the thing, and it plugs into or mirrors the real world in interesting ways, yet defies its rules in more interesting ways. It definitely has a pulse.

So I'm back, after a fashion. I'm now "dubid0", the username portion of my throw-away yahoo email. I'm rebuilding my network of climbing friends, who I missed like hell. I'm excluding some sources of mostly noise -- and some good, I have to say there wasn't anyone who was all noise -- that I felt too guilty to exclude last time around. I'm lurking more and RT'ing less, though it's hard to kick the habit of RT'ing my favorite article or blogpost of every morning. And, in the meantime, I'm debating the utility of bringing back the "slampoud" account in a professional capacity. Yeah, I guess I'll do it.