It was recently made clear to me that I spend rather too much time on Twitter. This point was driven particularly home when I dumped Twitter off my iPhone for two days. Not only did I not have to plug the phone in at work once, not only did I carry on using everything else like normal (including podcasts and playing music for most of the day), but when I left work I was still at 50% battery. Clearly, something is amiss with Twitter. It could be the app itself, but I think it’s the fact that checking Twitter like I tend to check Twitter means the screen is constantly on and the network is constantly refreshing.
Others (like Mat Honan and Ezra Klein) have written better about the firehose quality of Twitter and how it’s become progressively more difficult to drink from. I only routinely monitor about three accounts of my own. One is the (locked) original account, mostly just my actual friends. One is entirely for Vanderbilt purposes. The other, and effectively the primary one, is a catchall for everything – acquaintances from the days of all-day EDSBS comment sessions, assorted Redskins, critical bloggers and sites, parody accounts, authors, radio hosts…basically it’s a distilled stream of my Internet and broader interests, some 300 sources strong, spraying at full power pretty much all day every day. And like the early days of email, there’s the little endorphin hit that goes along with hitting “refresh” – less because maybe this time you’ll have something (oh, the agony of watching that Eudora progress bat at 14.4K waiting for the FROM header) and more wondering what you’ll have with this reload.
Ironically, the “Top News” feature I decried in Facebook is exactly what I need in Twitter. In Facebook, where the people I follow are actually my friends and number less than a hundred, I want to see everything they put up. On Twitter, where I’m following almost five hundred people between three different accounts, I would be fine with something that just hit the high points for the primary account and still let me look at the personal account Tweet by Tweet.
The problem now is that a technical fix may not be easy to come by. Twitter is slowly cutting off the oxygen to third-party clients, so coming up with a solution in software will largely depend on whether Twitter wants to offer one. It’s tough for me to imagine that something like that is too far off, though – the ability to charge people for pride of place on the pile is too good a revenue opportunity to relinquish, especially in a world where “promoted tweets” are already a (grudgingly) accepted part of the ecosystem.
(In non-tweet related technical news, today is a red-letter day: U-Verse access has just gone live on WatchESPN for iOS. For the first time, it’s possible to watch any games ESPN is offering online via my iPhone or iPad…and even stream them to the TV via the AppleTV unit. Given the nature of Vanderbilt athletics and SEC television contracts, I can now basically count on seeing any televised Commodores game on any device – no longer does it mean digging out the laptop and crouching around it. The last major obstacle to an iPad as my sole personal portable computing solution has been surmounted. This is what Vice President Biden would call “a big fucking deal.” Of which more later.)
You are very kind to not call me out. But I will own my complaint publicly. I have indeed noticed more presence from you in the last couple days and I am very grateful for it, but especially for you.