Twitterquette for Dummies

Meg Pickard on the things that make her Maaaad about Twitter - More input to the emergence of Twitterquette. :

1. Endless retweeting without adding any value or original thought in between. Or at all. If you retweet more than once a day, especially from the same source(s), I’ll likely dump you and follow them instead. NB, this is even more irritating when I already follow the person you’re retweeting.

2. Posting link after link after link even if they’re to really interesting articles and sites and things you’ve spotted on the web. I appreciate that this is a retro thing to say these days, but: Get a blog.

3. Saying good morning, hello, good night to your followers. This is not your personal radio show. This is not an AOL chatroom from 1995. We’ll know when you’ve woken up, because you’ll start twittering. We’ll know when you’ve gone up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire because you’ll have gone quiet, or possibly will have indicated something circumstantially relevant before you went (e.g. “Bugger this, there’s nothing on television: I’m going to bed”). Even though your mother brought you up well and it’s good manners generally, there really is no need to say “good night”.

4. Going to an event and liveblogging it via Twitter. Does what you’re communicating need to be communicated to this group of people, immediately? If not, then you could probably use a blog, and twitter once to say you’re covering it over there. NB This behaviour marks an interesting shift in people using Twitter as communication medium with known group to people using it as a microblog, so I see why it’s increasingly happening - but it’s infernally spammy if you’re not interested.

5. Using it to organise an event or rendezvous with other people who happen to be in your twitter list. Use email. Use direct messages. Use the telephone. Or invite everyone. But using a public medium for a private conversation is most vexatious and supererogatory.

6. Flooding the screen by updating 84 times in rapid succession. This matters, when you’re abroad and paying for every bit of data downloaded. A stream-hog is like a roadhog: inconsiderate and difficult to ignore.

7. Referring to people as “tweeple” or “tweeps”, questions as “twestions” or “twask”, adding someone to your list as a “twadd”, use of “tweet” or any other kind of meaningless derivative which is wholly unnecessary and infantile. People are still people, even if they’re on twitter. Questions are still questions. I realise that language evolves and new words are constantly being coined, but this stuff just makes me want to tweam and tweam and tweam until I’m twick.

Re Point 7 - people on Twitter are called Twits, right? There is a reason for that...........

Gotta love the retro "Get a Blog" in Point 2.

Points 4 and 5 point to the current inability to DM a group of people or that only those you want to see a message get it in their streams. In other words, we need to reinvent Twitter as email......

I'd add the following 3 pet hates:

8. Pimping Yo' Self - or worse, something you are flogging - in an OTT way. And I get to decide what OTT looks like!

9. Any use of the word AWESOME. It screams "Airhead"

10. Never, ever, tell all your followers to follow someone else. Your infatuation does not imply my substantiation

Feel free to add your own in the comments, I'll pull them up into the main post later!