Steve O’Grady and I have been talking recently about Twitter, social networks, friends, followers and the feeling of responsibility for what you post/tweet.¹

Of course it isn’t realistic, but I wonder if people would be more likely to absorb good Twitter behavior if they had to follow people for a week before they could post.

I self-censor in Twitter at times because what I’m writing will be distributed to 1000+ people. I’m sure I still post crap from time to time, but I do make an effort. 😉

It’s similar to the mailing list warnings I’ve seen. I remember one that would tell you something like:

Your words will be sent to n people and approximately x man hours will be spent reading them. Are you sure you want to send this?

Steve and I have similar tastes in Twitter behavior. After much chit-chat, we have come to the conclusion that Twitter could be vastly improved if they simply changed the question from:

What are you doing?

to:

Say something interesting.

Only somewhat snarkily submitted for your review. 😉

One other thing we’ve been discussing is how we react to “friending” activities in various social networks. I’ve gone so far as to set up a filter to auto-delete e-mail from Facebook, but similar e-mails from Twitter don’t seem to bother me. The difference is that the Facebook e-mails all come with a request for me to do something (log in, hit some buttons, etc.) while Twitter’s are just notifications that I can ignore or delete at my preference.

After discussing several different social networks, I’ve got a new postulate: the more a social network asks from me, the less likely I am to embrace it.

Agree or disagree? Sound off in the comments.

1. I’ve written about tweeting properly in the past. [back]