Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...But if Twitter, the human-curated information network, ceased to exist? Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about…

The thing is, effort does not scale well online. People have become conditioned to expect convenience; to expect to have the hard work done for them. The rise of mobile usage has hugely fueled this mentality — making it even more imperative for a digital service to be hyper simple to set up and use. If it doesn’t ‘just work’ within a matter of seconds it likely won’t get used at all.

Although I don’t have to spend very much time at all maintaining my Twitter feed now, with six years invested in the service, that’s exactly because I have spent multiple years figuring out who it’s worth my while following (and who not).

Sure there are undoubtedly plenty of folk on Twitter who I haven’t found yet who could expand my network in new and interesting ways. But you can’t usefully follow every interesting person (whatever Robert Scoble says). And, more importantly, I don’t trust an algorithm that’s geared towards maximizing business profits to identify interesting  people on my behalf. That algorithm would be working for Twitter’s shareholders, not for my brain.

Bottom line: who I choose not to follow is as core a part of why Twitter is so useful to me as those accounts I do add to my follow list....