Monday, February 25, 2013

Ways in which Twitter foolishly diminishes interactivity

1. Twitter for some strange reason imposes limits on the number of tweets. Since I'm a high volume tweeter, I'm always bumping up against those limits. If I go over the limit, I wind up in "twitter jail" -- i.e. I can't tweet for an unspecified period of time. So I often have to refrain from responding to people who've tweeted to me directly, or thanking people, or asking people questions, or greeting people, or saying "you're welcome" or "how are you", because doing so would put me "in jail".

2. Again because I'm a high volume tweeter, I try to space my tweets out when possible. I use socialoomph.com as my tool for doing that. However, whenever I have "@" in my tweet, Twitter often rejects it as an "unsolicited mention". Which means that I can't use my spacing tool for tweets which (a) respond to someone, or (b) mention someone, or (c) retweet someone. So the people whom I would have liked to mention, often the authors or publishers of the blog post or article in question, will never know.

3. The twitter retweet button is another anti-conversation impediment. If anyone retweets me with that, I usually never find out about it.

Twitter is shooting itself in the foot with these things.

Twitter should listen to its users.

Oh and how exactly does it help Twitter to (a) limit the number of tweets I tweet, (b) prevent me from mentioning other twitter accounts when my tweets come from socialoomph.com, and (c) prevent me from knowing who's retweeted me? Answer: it doesn't.

(Short URL for this post: http://goo.gl/HmnpQ)

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