Are You On My A-List??

I've been using Twitter for quite some time now, and enjoy it tremendously. Different people use the service for different things - some want to sell you something, some want to sell themselves to the world, some (like me) are more interested in the social side of things and some are just intrigued by the whole affair - I was in the last category when I first signed up.

I've got in contact with some incredibly nice people using Twitter, and as I've mentioned here several times, I feel like they're my friends, even though they live far away from me and I'll probably never meet them in person. I had penpals back in the last century - GroupieGirl still has several - and I sort of use Twitter as a 21st century penpal system, only we're restricted to 140 characters and we can get almost instant responses.

There's a lot of interesting people I follow on Twitter - indeed one of the criteria as to whether I follow you or not is whether you're interesting! I don't automatically follow people back - in fact it can take a few days for me to decide whether to follow you back, which can and does lead to some people getting impatient and un-following me. To which I say - you know what? Follow me because you want to read what I post, not because you want to boost your numbers. I've noticed people following hundreds - and in some cases thousands - on Twitter and I think to myself, why? They can't be reading every tweet. Their twitterstream must look like the public timeline. I'd rather have a smaller number of interesting and engaging people. Quality, not quantity is my watchword here.

I like to read everything that comes in - and interact with the people I'm following. Now that I've almost 50 people on that list, I find myself struggling to keep up - and unwilling to follow new people. That 50 mark is putting me off - rather like 40 did earlier. And that's a shame, because I want to be open to following new people. It doesn't help that many of these are quite prolific tweeters, as in 40+ a day, mainly @-replies to others who I don't follow (not that I can say anything about that, as I do that sort of thing too...)

So, I've developed a system (using Tweetdeck) which I'll be using for Twitter from now on - actually, have been unofficially using it for a while now. This started out by drawing up criteria as to "when should I stop following someone to free up a slot for someone else" and developed into the following:

The first step was to create three groups in Tweetdeck - the A-list, B-list and C-list. In the A-list I put the 10 people I feel closest to on Twitter - my ten most wanted, if you like. These are the people who I have "conversations" with almost every day on the system. I read everything that comes in to that group, usually checking it a few times a day as I would email.

In the B-list went the "next 20" followers - people who I don't feel so close to, but who I still find interesting and somewhat engaging. I have a filter on this column which hides all the "@-replies" these people post (the ones meant for me are still seen, as I have a "replies" column on Tweetdeck as well). What's left I read as it comes in, and at the end of the day I'll take the filter off and skim through the replies to see if anything's interesting.

Everyone else went into the C-list - celebs, people I'm following who weren't following me and people who I don't find as engaging but still come out with the odd gem. Again, the "@-replies" to everyone except myself are filtered out, and what's left I skim through precisely once, at the end of the day. If I'm short of time, the @-replies in this group don't get read (and if I'm REALLY short of time, then none of it does...)

In this way I find I'm making the best use of my available time on Twitter. However, to keep things that way, I've also got a system of promotion and relegation going between the lists, and here's how that works:

I have a note of who is on which list (quite easy to do with only 50 people, it's true). If someone posts something that I find interesting enough to re-tweet (irrespective of whether I actually re-tweet it) then I draw a white circle beside their name. If I send a reply or direct message to someone, they get a black circle. If someone sends a reply or direct message to me, they get a black triangle. If I've both sent and received a reply from someone (in other words, a "conversation" has taken place) they get a black square. It's really easy to do this at the end of a day - just a skim through my "replies", "direct message" and "favourites" columns (I use the "favourites" to keep track of interesting stuff).

Once every quarter-moon (the alien equivalent of "once a week") anyone who doesn't have anything beside their name gets a red "X", and then we start from scratch again in a new column. At the full moon and the dark moon (i.e. roughly once every two weeks) then I move people from one list to another depending on what symbols are beside their name. Anyone in the C-list who has a string of red "X"s gets unfollowed - clearly they're not interesting me as much as perhaps they were. At least on Twitter - recently I unfollowed one guy and subscribed to his blog RSS feed instead, as I found that more interesting.

I shall see how this system plays out, but I think it'll work well for me - instead of putting an arbitrary cap on how many I follow, I'll be following people who interest me, however many that may be, keeping it fresh and up-to-date, and prioritizing the people who REALLY interest me. It's just a shame I can't follow just my replies, DMs, and A-listers on my iPhone (O2 don't do text notifications, not in this country anyway)

Oh, and by the way - I'm not telling who's on which list. I'm confident my followers already know :)

AMII STEWART - FRIENDS
(from the album "Try Love", 1984)