Rethinking How I Use Twitter

28 Oct 2015

Over time I’ve developed a method of using Twitter for two main purposes. One way is for social interactions, asking questions & responding to other people’s. The second way has been as a link bookmarking service.

Twitter Typographic Wallpaper via https://flic.kr/p/69cP9q

When I read an interesting link I’ll Tweet it, with some associated hastags, via my personal account. These Tweets are then picked up by an IFTTT recipe which strips out the links & hashtags and adds them to a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is then imported into my personal wiki meaning I have quick access to useful information in my main areas of interest (UX, Typography. Design, etc.).

What this means is I now have a lot of Tweets - my link collection process get mixed up with the more personal, social interactions.

So I’m planning to change the way in which I use Twitter. I’ll now (be trying to) keep it purely for the social, communicative aspects, reaching out for feedback or helping out where I can. The links/bookmarking aspect I’ve been using Twitter for will go via other channels, still allowing me to keep an up to date wiki of useful information but keeping it apart from my other Twitter interactions and hopefully removing some of the noise from my account.

I’ll be interested to see how this works over time but it’s always interesting to change processes and observe how this affects useage & efficiency.