my Twitter philosophy

Yes, I'm on Twitter.

I post whatever comes to mind there. It's a mix of personal and professional. I tweeted when I broke my foot, I tweeted when the latest Office:Mac updates came out. I tweet when I'm looking for participants in my usability studies, I tweet when I'm making cookies. If you're looking for just MacBU news, then I'm not the girl to follow. If you're just wondering what's going on in my personal life, you'll need to find another outlet for that -- I recommend the telephone, or maybe drinks at MWSF.

I don't really care who follows me, or how many followers I have. Whenever I see that I've got a new follower, I do check to see who they are and what they're talking about. If a new follower has a protected stream, then I don't follow them because I can't make an informed decision about whether I'm interested in their content. If I see that someone's stream is mainly comprised of retweets or links, then I don't bother following them either. I like Twitter for its conversation, for how it lets me peer into others' lives. Retweets and links don't give me that. And sometimes I just look at the content and decide that it's not of interest to me. None of this is intended as a value judgment on the tweeter, it's just that I don't have the bandwidth to follow everyone, and I'm perfectly okay with that. By extension, this means that I'm perfectly okay with following someone and them not following me back. I don't view Twitter as requiring quid pro quo. If they don't find my content as useful/meaningful/interesting/whatever, then I don't mind.

I also don't view Twitter as something that I need to keep up with. If I miss tweets, I'm okay with that. I do read all of my replies and direct messages, but I view most tweets as ephemeral and non-essential. If I'm behind on something, Twitter is the first to go. I like Twitter, but my day job and my real life always take precedence.

I respond when I'm asked a question (regardless of who it's from), and I even on occasion do a Twitter search to see what kind of comments are being made about the apps I work on. If I can help folks out, I'll do it. That's not always containable on Twitter, though, and sometimes I'm forced to punt to tech support or another forum because I don't know the answer or because it's too in-depth for Twitter's 140 characters.

I think that there's some coolness to Twitter, and we'll see how that evolves over time. For now, I'm happy with what I'm doing and how I'm interacting with others.