Smart Bombs & Twitter Clutter

Quality is a Human Job

Managing your Twitter account is like using smart bombs. No matter how smart the technology, you can never guarantee a good target unless a human evaluates it. In other words, you have to read tweets to determine who the good tweeters are; you can’t rely upon Twitter or the various Twitter-related applications to do it for you.

Consider that recently, I retweeted this tweet by Justin Harrison:

Cleaning up my twitter clutter for more effective and meaningful communication…been doing that a lot lately

To which I received this from Dr. Mitchell Friedman:

would love to hear your definition of Twitter clutter, and how you clean it up

So, let’s explore this.

Twitter clutter is the group of tweets you endure from followers just so you can increase your following. You follow them so they are encouraged to do likewise. Both benefit because your followers increase. Twitter creates this condition because size matters and because it has no good way of quantifying tweet quality, only tweet quantity.

How do you clean it up? Well, I use my lists. Everyone whom I follow goes on a list based upon tweet quality. I define good tweeters as people who are:

• Causing me to stop and ponder
• Making my life better
• Promoting me or my ideas
• Possessing personalities I want to see flourish
• Being good friends
• Puzzling because I don’t know why I like them

Yes, some sites measure clout, but heck Satan has a lot of clout. How do they determine whether it’s good clout, bad clout, confusing clout, disruptive clout, nonsensical clout or any type of clout?

In the end, only a human can clean up Twitter clutter; qualitative assessment is a job for a human.