Comments on: Twitter Pruning Principles

By: beau

beau — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:26:28 +0000

Flippant was probably a poor word choice, but then you knew that, hence the parenthetical. Not sure why anyone would take you to task when the disclaimer was so clear.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:46:40 +0000

I look forward to the results too– it seems to me that she is explicitly doing what most people do, at least in part, to grow their networks– following on the leads provided by the few trusted “seeds.”

As for it being flippant– I wish people would read what I’ve written– TWICE now– about that. I said that *I* take Twitter conversations more personally and that Jen’s method is flippant from MY perspective. I don’t like informal as a descriptor because while true, that’s a valid way for ME to operate. I consider dropping everyone I follow, whether in pursuit of an experiment or not, to be a flippant treatment of community. Which is why, at this point, I wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t mean that for SOMEONE ELSE it isn’t.

I’m not particularly surprised that you jumped gallantly to Jen’s defense, though, even if the slight is misperceived

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:35:56 +0000

I wouldn’t describe Jen’s pruning as flippant at all. She said before beginning the process that she wanted to experiment with rebooting her social network, and rebuilding it through a more thoughtful/directed approach rather than the current quasi-random accretion method. The only reason she had to drop everyone is because Twitter doesn’t provide any robust methods to manage contacts (just add/drop – tools like TwitterKarma and TweetClouds help but a full deletion reboot is the only way to start fresh).

Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of the experiment. I’ve seriously thought about nuking my accounts on several services and starting fresh, but Jen took a less drastic approach.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:38:49 +0000

Disagreement is OK. For me, dropping everyone I followed at once without some criteria is flippant. FOR ME.

Using the random conversation points that happen to emerge between contacts is a fine way to go about adding people back… in fact probably among the best and most natural ways to grow a network. I suspect that many people use the basics of that part of your method without thinking about it. But that doesn’t make it “formal” in my opinion… nor should it be! Twitter isn’t about formality.

By: Jen

Jen — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:36:46 +0000

I completely agree that the approach is personal and one won’t work for everyone. I disagree that my approach was flippant. In fact, I decided on that approach out of respect for those with whom I converse the most. I would have preferred not to have dropped everyone, but there was no practical way to sort through more than 300 people. As soon as I dropped everyone, I added back 25-30 or so of my most frequent connections. From there, I added the people with whom they conversed. I am now following 75 and have met several new people I feel will contribute to my experience. While my approach was lighthearted, I certainly don’t think it was disrespectful. Considering I used as formal data as I could find to add my contacts back, I wouldn’t say it was informal either.