Tuesday, April 24, 2012

#tweettypes

Tweets fall into three broad categories that can be sorted according to whether they link elsewhere.  The true and perfect tweets are self-contained units of information, a pithy saying or joke, some with the beauty of a haiku.  At the other extreme are pointers to get you to read elsewhere.  In between is a matter of degree.  Thus:

  1. self-contained
  2. useful by itself, with link to explain more
  3. useless without expanding link.

When I don't have a WiFi connection, or am just looking for a quick diversion, I wish my tweet-stream could be filtered to allow only type 1). It shouldn't be hard to filter out all tweets containing links.
It would be nice to have the option to filter the type 2) tweets in and out, but that would be harder.

Another way to break tweets into three categories is

  1. general interest
  2. personal message
  3. advertisement.

There are authors and others whose tweets I follow, but I would rather filter out what they had for lunch or some reply to a message I didn't get from a friend of theirs.  For now, when there is too little useful information in the mix, I just un-follow.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:25 PM

    I have been ruminating on your earlier blog entry: "please follow my blog . . ." and about to respond. But I found two more entries. Guess, I have been ruminating too long. I like to think about things and take time. But once again the time went past me and here I am. Now i only had a minute to ruminate and respond to the Tweet. I never done tweeting. your entry makes me want to try the tweeting or receiving. So how do I start? Once I start, I think then I can think about your helpful guidelines. So point me to how to start and try it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. First, you can reply to any blog entry at any time, even if there are more entries that follow it.

    Second, to get started on Twitter:
    1) go to twitter.com, 2) sign up, 3) follow @SandyBoynton 4) laugh.

    If you think something is funny or good or have another reason to want to remember it, then click the little star that says "favorite". If you want to send it to all your followers, then click "Retweet".

    Have fun.

    ReplyDelete