See, I have the opposite position on Facebook, because all I have there are one-to-one conversations. They’re very personal. I ask much more invasive questions and I can match it up with their profile. And (huge AND) I can have that conversation BEFORE I decide to accept their friend request. Immensely valuable.

I don’t deal with many different streams in Facebook. It’s pretty much messaging and, when I feel like saying something publicly to someone, their wall. That’s it.

With twitter, we exchange a few DMs and I don’t really ever feel connected to the person, no matter how many Tweets I see go by. There are exceptions of course. Facebook status updates, which I get as an RSS feed, are a much more manageable way to get that same sense of who someone is. I have twice as many friends in Facebook as I do followers in Twitter, but I never feel strained by it. I also don’t get 25 friend requests from people I don’t know. That does happen in Twitter though, where I’ve left 8 requests undealt with.

My problem is that I feel a genuine commitment to the people I’ve accepted into my social networks, but Twitter requires too much commitment to scale well for me. It’s TOO connected.

So I either have to walk away or change my usage. And I haven’t quite worked it out yet. Some separation will help. Thus, the hiatus. Walking away hasn’t been bad so far. It’s certainly increased my blogging.

On the other hand, Facebook has failed to pull me in the same way. I think because twitter is one big feed but facebook has new messages scattered everywhere (wall, super wall, fun wall, messages, surveys, notifications, friend requests, pokes, super pokes, et al). I start to lose interest after the 25th friend request of someone I don’t know (but meanwhile I would follow that same person on twitter–go figure). I find it interesting you invite people to have substantial conversations on facebook. I have had far more substantial conversations on twitter than I ever could have on facebook. My experience is that facebook just disperses any way to communicate substantially.

My problem is my seeming inability to hop in and out of the conversation. I scan actually scan tweets fairly quickly if I don’t join the conversations, but what fun is that? And once I’m in, I find myself checking for replies and all that time-suck behavior.

I could certainly, for the most part, use Twitter to broadcast things about my life and only pay attention to responses. Avoid the conversations that I don’t start altogether. I don’t even need to go to Twitter to see most of the responses. I have Tweet Scan feeds set up for my username and for the show.

And if that was the way I’d used it initially, I might be more comfortable with it, but now it sounds kinda spammy by comparison, something of which I’m trying to be conscientious. But that’s that anti-self-promoter part of my personality that plagues most everyone in librarianship. Maybe I need to be less afraid of that.

But I also don’t want to come off as not caring about what’s going on with everyone else. ‘Cause that’s just not true. Switching to a one-way experience with Twitter would be a bitter pill to swallow.

I like that you check in on the pages of certain friends. That’s something I might find myself doing. I like to keep tabs on my boss, for example.

Again, thanks for helping me work through the possibilities.

I belong to a number of different social/professional circles that use twitter, and I like to see all sides of a conversation, so have aggressively sought out people to follow at the beginning. Also, I found women to be reluctant to seek out followers, so went purposely in search of women with similar interests to follow as a way of bringing them more into the conversations.

I’m now at the point where I have roughly 900 followers and people I follow, but not exactly the same set. I look carefully at each request and decide if I want to follow someone back, if I am happy to just let them follow me, or if I am going to block them out (in the case of the spammy or creepy ones).

This has had certain effects:
(1) it is not humanly possible to follow all the discussions
(2) I am more self-conscious about what I post
(3) I can lose even more time in it.

What I now strive for is to jump in and out of conversations a little more, use it as a water cooler since I am working from home. To me it makes me feel connected to the world at large when it is just me and the computer all day. My priority is to check replies (@conniecrosby); I get any direct messages (DMs) sent to my email so I see them quickly. Finally, I periodically check the twitter pages of certain friends to see what they are up to (you would be one of those friends, but don’t ask me for an actual list since it changes-heh!).

When things are working well I use it as a reward for work accomplished. Do an hour of research/writing, check twitter for 5-10 min. As others do, I like to post a note when I have finished something. Funny reward system, and yet far less fattening than using chocolate or cookies. LOL!

The difficult part is being able to close it down and get constructive work done. Easier said than done. But to be honest, email was a problem for me before this, so the way you have replaced Second Life with Twitter, so I have replaced email with Twitter.

Can we find something to replace Twitter that is more constructive? I enjoy these conversations with you whether in Uncontrolled Vocabulary, or on Twitter, or via email…maybe finding the few people who really engage us to create something bigger and better in our world would work.

Namaste.