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

I’ve known about Twitter for a long time now, but I haven’t used it too much because very few people I actually know are using it. I think the reason for that is that my friends and family just don’t get Twitter.

Well, there’s a site called Common Craft that has a video called Twitter in Plain English. It does a good job explaining what Twitter is, and why you might want to use it. I’m hoping that this video will entice my friends and family to start using Twitter.

If you’re interested in what I’m up to, you can find my Twitter profile here.

Well, I finally got sick of Facebook. When I joined, it was pretty cool. It was a great way to reconnect with people you haven’t kept in touch with, and convenient for keeping track of what your friends were up to.

Facebook applications changed all that. What a pain in the ass these things are. I hated getting all the unnecessary emails telling me I’ve been invited to install some app that I had no interest in using. And all those apps like Super Wall, and Fun Wall were just a nuisance.

I liked the idea of a “wall” that people could write on for all to see, but it got more complicated when these clones started appearing, and people starting using them all the time.

And don’t even get me started on the advertising/privacy issues.

Anyway, I deleted my account. I’ll keep in touch with people by msn or email from now on.

Adios Facebook!

A while back I wrote about this social music site called iLike that I use. The iTunes plug-in gives you music suggestions based on what you’re currently listening to, and it offers up some similar free music as well.

Anyway, there’s this game called the iLike Challenge that I’m really hooked on. It’s a “name that artist” kind of game. The quicker you guess, the more points you get. 10 points is the maximum you can score on each question, and there’s this guy who has over 14000 points! I’m up over 1700, and that took a while, so I can only imagine how much time that guy spent playing.

Check it out, and add me to your friends list, so I can see how you do.