The Dangers of Twitter
Lately I’ve been doing some soul searching about my responsibility to the online community. I recently became a fairly heavy Twitter user. Any time I am at my computer, Tweetdeck is running. At work, I have Tiny Twitter running on my phone.
Interested in monetizing wesites and blogs, I decided to give Magpie a try. I decided to have them post an ad in my tweet stream after every five tweets. I then tweeted things like what I had for breakfast, the weather outside, whatever was on my mind. I literally started to think in 140 characters or less. (‘This just happened, how would I tweet that?’) I was trying to earn some cash from Magpie!
My addiction truly hit home when I followed @SarahJL, and her automatic ‘thank you’ message had a link to ‘You Know You are too Popular on Twitter When…’. It might as well have been entitled ‘You Have A Problem and May Consider Finding Help’ because I could actually identify with much of what was being said.
I then came across ‘Using Twitter… ‘The Smart Way‘ by Darren Rowse. It was finally sinking in: I’ve got to back off. Around this same time, I get this message from @dungeekin: ‘@howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream.’ Insult to injury, I also received from @magpiers: ‘rt: @howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream. http://is.gd/aPGz’. The link takes you to the Magpie site. As near as I can tell, @magpiers is a bot that follows all tweets about magpie and retweets them. What possible good could this serve anyone? So I immediately discontinued Magpie with the total sum revenue of something like fifty cents. Fifty cents that I will never see, since they don’t send a check until you hit fifty bucks. Meh. It’s not worth losing followers to make a couple dollars. I would much rather monetize my own blog and earn money on the quality and merit of what I say than on spam.
So I will not tweet that it’s snowing in Avon, CO. If you haven’t heard of Avon, CO then you don’t care. If you have heard of it, then you know it’s snowing, because it’s Avon, CO! No one cares what I’m eating for lunch. My Twitter is set to update my Facebook, so I’m polluting that network with my crap too. I tweet out my new blog posts, but they get buried with all my other natterings before anyone has time to click the links. I say thee NAY! From now on, it’s more conservative twittering for me.
I would urge all fellow tweople to do the same!
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Tags: Facebook, Networking, social networking, Twitter
