Suffering From Twitter Fatigue (Post-Twitter Stress Disorder)
June 1, 2009 :: Joe LoongI seem to be experiencing Twitter Fatigue (judging by the search results, it’s a term I can’t even pretend to have coined). It’s not so much the constant talking about Twitter, or even the hearing about it. It’s more like the actual using of it. But not the part where I broadcast to my legion of, um, 338 followers — that bit’s fine. It’s the trying to keep up with the 275 people I’m following that’s giving me trouble.
In the Twitter realm, following 275 people is nothing. Small potatoes. Chump change. Still, when I boot up in the morning, I find that I can’t bring myself to scroll back in my Twitter client (still Twhirl at the moment — I did test the Twitter integration in the Adium 1.4beta… that lasted about 10 seconds) to see what I missed.
Comparatively, I don’t seem to have a similar problem with Facebook, even though I have more friends there. Granted, I use it a lot differently (i.e. primarily as a birthday reminder service), and there’s more activity on Twitter (i.e. Twitterers blab a lot more — though I should crunch some numbers and see if this is real or just my perception).
But more than that, it’s easier for me to parse and categorize the different types of information on Facebook — invites, status updates, photos, messages, silly quizzes, etc. Partly, this is a function of looking at the Web page (vs. using a client interface), where different types of activity are explicitly compartmentalized in different sections — birthdays over here, events over here, etc.
Additionally, in Facebook, even in the big morass of status updates in the center well, different types of information look different. At first, I wasn’t a fan of thumbnails for embedded hyperlinks, though I find them useful now, if only to distinguish them as hyperlinks. Conversely, in Twitter, whether you’re talking about an event invite, hyperlink, photo link, or whatever, it’s all text (at least, in all the clients I’ve used so far), and therefore, you have to work harder to categorize each post… before you can even decide whether it’s worth paying attention to. (In McLuhan-esque terms, it’s a “cooler” medium, requiring more work. I seem to be on a McLuhan kick lately.)
Furthermore, public conversations on Facebook are threaded, or at least grouped. I’m not a fan of excessively threaded conversations (where every reply is spun off into its own branch), but basic grouping of participants really helps preserve context, especially when you’re dipping in and out of the conversation. If you’re going to stay immersed in the conversation (as in, say, a realtime IRC chat), a perfectly flat conversation is fine, since you can see the flow of posts, which provides cues as to who’s responding to whom, whereas if you’re viewing a chat transcript, you lose that aspect of data and have to rely solely on proximity of responses to statements (or study timestamps, which is tedious).
Anyway, all the extra “work” in parsing Twitter conversations is leading me to Post-Twitter Stress Disorder (no disrespect intended to those affected by actual PTSD). I’m not sure what to do about this — I’m not sure how much pruning my followers would help, and switching back to the Web interface doesn’t seem workable (still doesn’t address the homogeneous appearance of posts).
I’m open to suggestions — please leave a comment if you’ve got one.
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