Aaron Landry put together a thorough post of everything he doesn’t like about Twitter, or how Twitter is used by many people. It’s worth a read if you’re a Twitter user and have ever been frustrated with how some of the people you follow use the service.
Here’s the short version.
Aaron doesn’t like it when:
1. Public Repliers: People use the service as a public chat room where you end up seeing 1/2 of conversations.
2. Link aggregation: People dumping links on Twitter rather than using services like del.icio.us or Tumblr
3. Mundane situational tweets: Giving status updates on the weather, traffic, or daily complaints.
While there probably isn’t an easy way to define right vs wrong when it comes to using a service like Twitter, I think many people have used it long enough to know what they’d like to get out of it.
My interests are similar to Aaron’s. I like to learn something from the Tweets I receive. It could be breaking news, what my friends are doing, or stuff I find funny. Reading one sided conversations or dozens of tweets from one user turns me off, so I find other people to follow.
I also follow most people via RSS rather than SMS since hardly anyone says anything valuable enough to warrant interruptions. According to Google Reader’s Trends reporting, I’m processing 123.4 tweets/day via RSS, which is just about right for my taste.