Twitter

I use Twitter frequently (@stackiii), and I invite you to follow me.

I will not always follow back. Please don’t take it personally – I just can’t follow everyone, and frankly, the Internet is not a race. I can only consume so much information at one time, and deliberately limiting my Twitter diet helps me to keep up with the velocity of information running through the medium.

I do try to respond to just about every @-reply sent my way. If you engage me in enough conversation, I will probably follow you, because I believe Twitter is a conversational tool.

My tweets themselves will without doubt be erratic. I might not be on Twitter for three or four days at a stretch (however unlikely that may seem). But then I might tweet 200 times in one day – this is especially true of hockey season and/or during major political events.

You’re welcome to follow my conversations, and just maybe you’ll find other interesting people. You’re welcome to ignore my conversations with others, and that’s fine too. The people I follow are the people with whom I’ve had interesting discussions.

I follow:

• People who are local to me
• Other flacks – digital and traditional
• Other wonks – left, right, and center
• Other activists – left, right, and center
• People who are interesting – a subjective term
• People who can occasionally be abusive and abrasive
• A handful of organizations, blogs, news outlets, and celebrities, who are interesting

You’ll notice that I have more people following me than I follow in return. Again – don’t get hung up on the number, or take this personally. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple years now, for a variety of purposes, and have amassed a following across various communities of interest, owing to what I can only hope has been content from me that is equally as interesting as the content I consume from the people I follow.

I’m sort of agnostic about “Twitter Etiquette.” If someone showed you a list of how people should behave on Twitter, I would probably disregard over half of it. There’s no such thing as “too many tweets,” or “multiple tweets,” or “following too many people,” or “follower/following ratios,” or “welcoming new followers.” There are no rules, there are no guidelines. Just be yourself, be a human, and be humane.

(*steps off soapbox*)

Hugest of hat tips to Isaac Pigott.