I’ve got issues with Twitter.

I first heard of Twitter from Prokofy Neva, who writes a blog about Second Life. Prokofy mentioned Twitter for example in this post from early 2008, in which he notes that Twitter first came into fashion among early adopters at the 2007 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.

I signed up for Twitter using the name and photo of my Second Life Avatar. I’ve signed up for many web services as my Avatar, because the anonymity (or rather, the “pseudonymity“) allows me to freely experiment with minimal consequences for my real-life identity.

I started by looking for other Second Life avatars to follow. Most of them followed me back. I was soon following about 100 twitterers, and being followed by almost as many.

Twitter is Chronovore

I immediately had Twitter issues. Trying to follow 100 people on Twitter is pretty much a full-time job. I struggled for a few weeks to keep up, but was spending huge amounts of time reading Tweets. It was clearly getting to be a problem.

So I let it drop for a while. Then I decided to try another approach. I created a new Twitter account, with which I only followed 40 Second Lifers. I hand-picked them as information sources concerning my greatest personal interests. However, I left my first Twitter account active. This has turned out to be useful: if I want to publicize something, I still can use my original account to send a message to some 120 followers.

But following even 40 Twitterers took up too much of my time. Tweets often contain links to blog articles, YouTube videos, and so on, which I then spend time looking at. Twitter is replacing RSS as the preferred way of keeping up on what is happening in the blogosphere. This was noted recently by both Mashable and TechCrunch. (But don’t tell Dave Winer.)

So I pruned down the list of people I follow in depth to only 16 Twitterers. And now I’ve got a new problem: I’m out of touch with all of the others.

Filtering vs Sampling

Of course EVERYONE has the same Twitter issues. Once you pass a certain number of followers, it becomes impossible to keep up with them all. There are basically two ways to deal with the information overload: you either filter or sample.

One way to filter is to reduce to a minimum the list of those you follow, as I did in cutting it down to 16 people. Another way to filter is to use a desktop application such as Tweetdeck to filter those you follow. But I prefer to use Twitter straight. Also, I’m reluctant to let people think I’m following them, when I really am not. As Seth Simonds said in this post: “Why not publicly own up about who you find valuable?”

The other approach is to be satisfied with sampling the Twitter stream. This means that you open Twitter and look at the Tweets that go by as long as you have it open, and then you close it and miss everything that goes on until you log in again.

Many Twitter users seem to opt for the sampling approach. Howard Rheingold for example advises that we should stop thinking about Twitter as a queue that you have to catch up with, and understand it as something that you *sample*. But this means giving up all hope of systematically following the output of your favourite Twitterers.

Twitter’s Lack of Reciprocity

Most social media, such as Facebook for example, use a reciprocal “friending” process. You ask another user to be your friend, and if they reply favourably, each of you can see the output of the other.

A rather unique feature of Twitter is that it lacks such reciprocity. You can follow someone who does not follow you, and vice versa. Tim O’Reilly finds this asymmetric follow to be a great advantage. He says: “I can’t even keep up regularly with the 500+ people I do follow on Twitter; keeping up with the 400,000 who follow me would be impossible.

But this lack of reciprocity means that most users end up following others who never follow them back. The Harvard Business Review recently reported on a study that showed that 10% of twitter users post 90% of the tweets. This follows directly from the lack of reciprocity: why reply to a Tweet when you know the other person will miss your reply?

As Mark Drappeau clearly put it: “Twitter is not a conversation.” It is more like Wikipedia, where a small handful of active participants create content, and the majority of users merely consume the content produced by others.

My Temporary Fix

Which brings me to my present predicament.

I use one Twitter account, under my avatar’s name, to follow 16 Twitterers passively and on a permanent basis. Now I have created a new Twitter account, under my real name, which I want to develop as an online personal presence. I chose a group of Twitterers familiar to me, and was quickly following some 57 Twitterers. But only 7 of those who interest me have followed me back.

Because everyone has the same Twitter issues. In the early days most users systematically followed back those who started following them (except for spammers and other such undesirable followers). But now your average user is suffering from massive information overload, and is looking for ways to limit the number of people they follow.

My plan is to continue to use my avatar account to follow 16 Twitterers, which is a form of filtering, and to use my real-life account for sampling the stream. But if I want to reply to a Tweet I see on my filtered avatar account, I have to switch over to my real-life account and post my reply there, so that my real-life account will grow. This temporary fix still leaves me with lots of Twitter issues.