I love Twitter.  Let’s get that out of the way right now.  I think it’s a great way to share information, and keep up with friends, family, and people with shared interests.

Despite all the benefits to Twitter, there are a number of things that irritate me, and take away from the ideal user experience, and I thought I’d share them with you.

First of all, and probably the most irksome of Twitter’s flaws isn’t with the service itself, but in how people use it.  Some people are obsessed about the number of followers they have.  Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) recently put out a call for more Twitter followers in a bid to reach 1 000 000 in order to surpass CNN.  So, he wants publicity.  Fine.  What about all the non-celebrity Twitter users out there who spend all there energy getting followers?  What’s the point?

And then there are the people who follow thousands of other people.  How could you possibly keep track of everything all of these people have to say?  I look at my Twitter stream, and I see that half of the tweets are replies to people I don’t know.  I follow 40 people.  I can’t imagine trying to weed through tweets from a couple hundred people, let alone a couple thousands. The signal to noise ration is just way to high on Twitter.

Next, I really can’t stand it when all people tweet about is Twitter.  I was following they guy in my area who would tweet something like this: “@soandso Thanks for the follow” every time he got a new follower.  Since he was getting quite a few new followers every day, this became essentially spam.  I had to unfollow him for my own sanity.

Then there’s #followfriday, which I think is great.  The idea here is that you both follow people and have followers with similar interests.  If this is the case, it makes sense that some of your followers might find somebody you follow to be interesting.  So, on Fridays, you recommend a person or two that you follow to your followers by tweeting something like this: “#followfriday #topic_of_interest @soandso, @someotherguy”. So, those of your followers who are interested in #topic_of_interest may want to check out @soandso and @someotherguy. Simple.

The problem comes from those obsessed people in my first point who want to follow and be followed by as many people as possible.  Sometimes you’ll see tweets from them recommending dozens of people at a time.  This kind of defeats the purpose of #followfriday.  When I see this, I just ignore it because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

And finally, I despise services like Mr. Tweet and Tweetmeme that flood your twitter stream with automated garbage. I also find it irritating when people automatically cross-post from other social networking services like Facebook or Blip.fm.  Why do you think that your twitter followers want to know about every song you think is great on Blip.fm?  If you want your followers to know about your newest blog post, that’s fine, but your facebook status?  I don’t get it.

Feel free to post this on all your social networks, and follow me everywhere