Twitter, Twitter-rings and my own Twitter policy

I’ve been on Twitter for just over a month, and whilst I can see its advantages, there are some real risks and shortcomings, as Ron Tolido points out on his ‘Slow IT‘ blog. There’s a real power in building a ‘Twitter-ring’ around a single hashtag, such as we did with the ‘#ogadc‘ hashtag at the TOGAF conference – though I have to remember to ‘engage brain before opening mouth’ (or Twittering fingers, in this case), when I ranted just a bit too overtly about the inanities of the money-economy in the midst of what was supposed to be an analysis of a business-architecture study… oops… 🙁

But it’s easy for Twitter to get out of control: the maximum volume I can cope with in a day is perhaps 100-150 tweets. So my basic policy on Twitter is this:

• anyone is welcome to follow what I do, other than the Twitter-spammers (of whom there a fair few already, unfortunately)
• I can’t afford the time to follow anyone within my specific work-domain who posts more than an average of around 3-5 tweets per day (relevant Twitter-rings excepted)
• I can’t afford the time to follow anyone outside my immediate work-domain who posts more than an average of around 1-2 tweets per day
• I can’t afford the time to follow more than a maximum of about fifty people all-up, so on occasion I’ll have to un-follow someone I’m currently following, no matter how valued their tweets may be

I’m aware that shuts out tweets from a few valued colleagues, and a few very good personal friends, but that’s the best I can manage without going even further crazy than I already am. 🙂 And if you do need to reach me, there’s always email, after all.