Friendly Rules
At the recent and wonderful Podcamp Halifax, the first session that I attended was Joel Kelly‘s “Unfriend Someone Today“, which was all about pruning and managing the people who you count amongst your friends (online). There was a great discussion and I kept thinking about the number of people I follow on Twitter and how I add (or remove) friends with various social networking services. It also was strange to see many people in person who I follow on Twitter, but I hadn’t met in person.
I’m most stingy about following people on Twitter and more open in following people on Flickr, and Facebook is somewhere in the middle. With the social networks where I have fewer friends, I’ll check in on them several times a day, where I’m not so picky it will be every few days or longer before I check in.
On Twitter I’ve never followed more than 99 people and while I haven’t met most of the people that I’m following, I know why I’m following them and I would like to meet them all. I never automatically follow someone and I always will check out their previous tweets to see if I’m interested in following them. But (at least up to this point) if I decided to follow someone, I’ll have to unfollow someone else. This forces me to periodically go through the people I’m following, which is good. If all of the people I’m following were assembled together they’d fill just over half of the seats in the Al Whittle Theatre in downtown Wolfville. When I see tweets show up in Twitterific on my MacBook Pro or on my iPod Touch, I know who they are and usually what they’ve said before, so it’s generally quite meaningful. I don’t ever want to start filtering the people I follow as that would remove the immediacy and importance of what I’m reading, and that’s where my deep love for Twitter comes from.
On Twitter the general rules are that I’m more likely to follow someone if I have some sort of interaction with them and if they’re not posting a steady stream of links to their own stuff. Having updates is good, but the more automated stuff I see in a twitterstream, the less interesting it is to me. Delicious is great for links and to follow blogs I’d rather get that information through a feed that I’ll read through NetNewsWire. If anyone is tweeting about getting rich quick or stuff that is spammy I’ll quickly block them. If I’m following someone on Twitter I’m also following them on Flickr, their blog, 43 Things, last.fm, and Facebook as well.
I’ve been using Flickr since the summer of 2004, so over the past few years there are a number of contacts that I’ve collected. One of the great things about Flickr contact management is the ability to have three levels of friendliness ranging from “Contact” to “Friend” to “Family”. In classifying your photos you can share some things with the world, just your friends or just your family. All together on Flickr I have 273 contacts with 28 people classified as friends (mostly people I’ve met in person), and 15 family members. I check in on my Flickr peeps at least once a day through the web or with Fraser Speirs great iPod Touch / iPhone app Exposure to see what they are doing and maybe leave a comment or respond to comments. If I put all of my Flickr contacts into a theatre, it would fill the Alderney Landing Theatre (which is what the picture with this post represents). If someone adds me as a contact on Flickr I’ll check out their photostream and their profile and if they’re doing some things that I find interesting I will add them. For some reason I don’t worry about the number of people that I follow there as I can quickly scan through photos and look at interesting ones.
On Facebook I try to limit who I add as a friend and I have more rules. Currently I have 180 friends there. Earlier on Facebook I’d only add someone if I’d actually met them in person, but that started to slide a while ago, but I still don’t automatically add someone. With all of the applications and notifications I find that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite high, so I will go days or weeks without checking in and I have 143 requests that I haven’t even looked at. But I’ve actually met most of them (over 150 of them) in person. A lot of the information from my friends on Facebook is duplicated with Twitter (especially status messages) and it’s only when there is an event that I’ll stick around Facebook a bit longer. One big rule that I follow is that won’t add any of my current students as a friend (but I will after they are no longer students). For some reason I don’t want to have that blending of the personal and professional with the people that I’m teaching. In terms of a social gathering, the theatre downtown would be filled with my Facebook friends and with most of them I would have actually met them in person before.
So perhaps a simpler way to summarize all of the rules would be that with Flickr my contacts have interesting pictures, with Twitter they are people I’d like to meet, and with Facebook they are people that I’ve actually met.
I was inspired by Joel Kelly’s presentation at Podcamp Halifax too and culled my Facebook “friends” to less than 20 from 90. I just don’t care about all those people I went to school with 30 years ago. While I am glad they are around I wouldn’t likely interact with them in real life so why would I pretend to be interested. Since I dumped the care-nots I have found real meaning in the posts on Facebook. The people that remain actually mean something to me.
Twitter on the other hand, is something completely different to me. It is a human filtered, ideas exchange, the more humans = more exchanges; the more links and thoughts I can be exposed to the better. Twitter doesn’t offer grouping or categories of friends so the Groups in TweetDeck lets me manage who I follow. I have a small group of people I look to for inspiration, some local Twitterers (in which your tweets are located). I follow more than 1300 people and no I don’t read all the tweets. I don’t even really follow every tweet in my small groups but I read what I want when I want. If I want to check on a particular person I open their profile and look at the tweet history.
If there is one certainty about social media it is that each user decides how they use it and what they want to get out of it.
@Jay: What I used to really love about Facebook is that I knew everyone who I had as a friend, so it was a great way to stay in touch. But the noise increased so much that I don’t even notice if I don’t check in for a few weeks.
The Groups in TweedDeck sound like a great way to keep things manageable, but for me I like trying to keep it as simple as possible and interacting when I’m around, and with a lower quantity of tweets to look through I don’t feel as if I’m missing much as one of the people that I’m following will probably pick it up.
With the RSS and Atom feeds that I’m following I will remove a feed if I find that there is a lot of duplication with another feed as I try to keep most of what I read there as fresh and new information.
You’re exactly right about how each person decides how they’ll use social media and what they’ll get out of it. It’s fascinating to see how differently each person uses and interacts with various social media sites and communities.