Photo by hotblack.
In their help center article about Twitter following best practices, the following sentence is explicit:
“Twitter facilitates social networking, but it’s not a social networking website.”
Unlike Facebook which requires you to be friends with me for me to be friends with you, Twitter enables you to follow my tweets without my obligation to follow you.
Because there is no mutuality requirement on Twitter, their failed logic is the site does not promote friendship because it’s not 2-way.
The next paragraph is worse.
If you follow too many people, there’s no way you can keep up with everyone’s updates in your timeline. If you need to communicate with someone but don’t need to see their updates everyday, you don’t have to follow them. Send them an @reply when you need to; it doesn’t require following and your update will appear in the person’s replies tab, so they can reply back.
Thanks, Big Brother.
Rather than telling me who I can or can’t keep up with, how about letting me decide what I can or cannot do? If I want to follow people who choose to not follow me, why is that so wrong? Why can’t I decide which strangers I want to follow, interact with, and befriend?
About Ari Herzog
I don’t mind the fact that I don’t have to follow someone who follows me.
Perfect example: a real estate agent in Omaha decides to follow me because I mention Omaha in a random tweet. I don’t live in Omaha, and I have no reason to expect that I ever will. So an Omaha real estate agent that uses her account to tweet about real estate for sale in that area isn’t something that would benefit me. I wouldn’t follow back.
But I do have a problem with them posing an unpublished limit under the logic that following too many people means you can’t keep up with what people are saying, then SIMULTANEOUSLY allowing you to follow “too many” once you reach a certain number of followers.
Being able to keep up with the number of tweets in a Twitter stream isn’t dependent on how many people follow you. The two have NOTHING to do with each other. Yet that’s how Twitter seems to decide whether you can follow more than a certain number of people.
That makes no sense to me.
If you click the follow button so many times during a specific time period, that could construe you as a spammer and I recognize your inability to continue until a cooling-off period expires.
But if you’re following some people today and other people tomorrow, and not everyone inside of five minutes, you’re not overburdening Twitter’s servers and there should be nothing wrong with your wanting to continue that trend.
I completely agree. In my case, I’m trying to follow new people who’ve just followed me, and it has been at least a week since I last followed anyone.
If Twitter’s servers can’t handle minor changes like that, then something’s seriously wrong here.
I’d argue that Twitter is actually encouraging friendship as well as Facebook, from the simple fact it’s highlighting you only have so much of an attention span. By taking the natural route of this advice (keep your numbers low), it’s trying to make the connections more meaningful.
Who knows your attention span better than yourself, Danny?
My wife?
Is that a question?
Danny, I agree with your notion that we can have only so much of an attention span.
The thing is, Twitter seems to think that once you reach a certain number of followers, your own attention span somehow suddenly increases, and you THEN you can follow more.
If Twitter set a hard limit, based on what it assumes your attention span could possibly be, then they NEVER let anyone cross it, I’d have a lot less of a problem with their limits.
But I shouldn’t be prevented from following people who follow me based on how many OTHER followers I have. That makes it seem much more like a popularity contest than an attempt to foster anything in the way of real friendship.
Hi Patrick,
That’s a fair point and one that social platforms (Twitter especially) seem to miss. Perhaps the platforms aren’t so social after all.
Keep in mind why Twitter management began verifying user accounts. Not for you or me but for the so-called celebrities, so you can be assured @BritneySpears belongs to the performer and not some random girl.
Popularity contest? You betcha!
I like the people I interact with on Twitter. The folks I interact with on FB are generally people I have known since before social media existed. I like them too. I’m not interested in having Twitter or Facebook define friendship for me. Their opinion matters not.
How do you know people on Facebook before Facebook existed? You refer to sandbox friends?
Yes, 95% of the people who I’ve connected with on FB, are friends from college, work, high school, and I am guessing this is what you mean by “Sandbox” friends.
Ari, I don’t think Twitter is telling people how to behave.
Instead, it is clearing up a misconception about how conversations happen.
I’d imagine this is in direct response to some of the most expressed complaints about Twitter, from people who are used to doing things a certain way on Facebook and assuming (to the detriment of their experience) that they have to take additional steps to accomplish the task of communicating with another user.
What’s that, Ike? What’s the misconception about conversations that not being a social networking site clears up?
I agree with Patrick and the limit constraint. It gets in the way of the experience. Why won’t they let us follow as many people as we wish? Too bad. Maybe, they’ll change that one day.
I also agree with Danny, on the other hand, because Twitter has actually promoted a ton of friendships on my end and without Twitter, I wouldn’t have made so many great friends. It brings the world closer to one another.
In the end, every user has a different purpose when using Twitter and the final question to anyone is: why are you on xyz platform?
Cheers and thanks for your post!
If you’re centrist then there’s nothing else for me to write other than thanking you for leaving a comment.
Great insight Ari. What I noticed is that twitter is just becoming another marketing tool for PR. I agree that the “relationship” is not two way. And yes, with some people Twitter just becomes an online rant wall that sometimes is not worth looking anyway that will equal to a short attention span
Twitter is more than a marketing tool, Iola. It delves into business development, human resources, engineering, and other departments. That’s the beauty of it.
Facebook is a better social networking website. I made some true friends . I have 128 followers in twitter who are from various countries and some dont even match my interests. I dont know why they are following me.
If you don’t know why they’re following you, be proactive and ask them. Strike up conversations and you’ll never know where they’ll go!
What’s still so odd to me is Twitter allowing “Followers” and to be seen. Doesn’t that make for a site full of endless spam. I get so many “spam” followers looking for follow backs it’s not even funny. Seems like there should be a better method.
You can block your spam followers if you don’t like them there.
10/10 , i completely agree on this , Twitter is far beyond promotion of friendship and for most people it is a follow deal for each other .
Or basically the platform provided by twitter is not good for common people for day to day use like facebook , or even google+ is better than it !
If you don’t like twitter.com then try a different desktop or mobile application.
sounds like twitter is trying to do everything possiable to be diffrent social network then facebook.
but one thing twitter developers needs to do is to be creative and innovaitive. the method of cheking what facebook have and doing the opposite is the last thing twitter users want.
You can always tweet @twitter with ideas and they’re bound to see even if they don’t reply.
I am really impressive with what you think. But there are both pros and cons of everything. Twitter is famous for its followers which will easily tells you that who is following you while in facebook this is missing. Even if you get a lot of likes, then you will not be able to see all the likes if you have them in thousands. Twitter is just awesome and we all love it though i totally agreed that it is not compared to facebook. Both are best in some ways.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Rahul.
I really enjoyed reading your article about Twitter does not promotes Friendship. I do not know much about twitter. Thanks for the information and friendship greetings from Indonesia.
Thanks for visiting from Indonesia! Do many of your friends there tweet?
I’ve become closer with people on twitter than on Facebook. But then again, I love Twitter and try to use it to help others when I can offer help.
How are you helping people? What sort of topics do you help with?
I offer any kind of help I can. I wrote this post called, “What is the Purpose of Twitter” in which I talk about helping someone find their lost passport, helping someone who wanted to commit suicide, not do it. To me, that’s what life and Twitter are all about, helping others.
I use Twitter and facebook for socializing and for work. I didn’t agree more on what you said, you can also make friends on twitter by following their topics and interact with them.
Interaction is the key for relationship building. That’s very true, David, on Twitter and elsewhere too.
Interesting perspective. I really got bored with Twitter and hardly saw many ROI. When it first came out, I think there was more interactions, but now it is just flooded with people, mostly people with self-interest only, that I can’t seem to see as much as the benefit.
It’s easy to filter out people who distract you. You can also reply/retweet to whoever you want and then focus on those who reply back as well. Use Twitter as a conversation starter.
I think twitter is really not intended for social networking. It’s like an RSS for the latest events of those people you have followed. It is just like a shout-out and being a follower doesn’t necessarily mean as being a friend.
Followers don’t have to be friends. They can be groupies and fans, but they are important too.
Yeah,
I agree with what you said. I personally find it boring because you are no directly interacting with people unlike Facebook. It seems very boring to me but I use it for more exposure.
I always used to feel and think about the same topic……
What you’ve listed here are suggested usage. As far as I can tell Twitter doesn’t do anything to actually enforce these suggestions. So why should you care if they don’t consider themselves a social networking site.
They might suggest you don’t follow everyone but there’s literally nothing stopping you.
What Twitter DOES do, and this isn’t referenced in the article so I’m only guessing it’s the reason you wrote it, is have policies that are non-specific to blog spamming. That is to say you can’t friend every tweet you see because you end up with an imbalance of following 300 people and none of them are following you. It’s my understanding that if you get more people to follow you then you can again start following everyone. This has led to the twitter trend of “Following Back” to maximize the number of people you can follow.
Personally I couldn’t care less who is following me (after a few months I just turned off the new follower e-mail) and I wholeheartedly agree with the quotes listed above. The problem with Facebook IS the friends limits. The problem IS that you have to manually accept friend requests. Twitter does all the networking Facebook does but streamlined. It’s not just the 140 char but the fact that people can follow you without any work on your part is fantastic. I’ve never known of anyone to actually hit the twitter follow ratio limit unless they were new to twitter and trying to follow every celebrity they could think of.
The biggest problem with this strategy is the @reply system. On one hand it’s a brilliant incorporation of a community idea. However it CAN be abused. For most people it’s a light issue though. I get random people @replying me every once in a while. I suppose it might be worse for popular people.
Still the beauty of twitter relationships is that for the most part someone following you has little to no effect on you. They don’t get special access to special private thoughts because all your thoughts are public.
yes…i totally agree with this article..but twitter seems to be micro blogging in my country
After being on Twitter for 2 years now, I guess I have to agree that it does not promote friendship in comparison to Facebook. The fact that followers don’t have to return the favor makes it a one-side relationship for some.