Twitter: damned if you follow, damned if you don’t

I love Twitter. But I’m starting to fall very much out of love with some of the tweets that pop up in my stream.

Yes, obviously, Twitter offers us a quicker, less formal, real-time version of email. And yes, it’s gone way beyond its original plan to publish everyone’s answer to “what are you doing?” It’s become a 21st century version of IRC, reincarnated into something with a permanent archive, so that it doesn’t really matter when you’re online or offline — the conversation never ends. This makes it an incredibly powerful form of mass communication. But there’s a dark side.

Now that we’ve all filled up with overflowing tanks of followers and whittled down the number of people we follow to a manageable and relevant list, what do we do when we realise that some of the people we feel we have to follow (for business, personal or other reasons) mutate into people we absolutely, thoroughly, completely and desperately want to unfollow? I’m not talking about the people on the edge of the ripple. I’m talking about your core group. The people who you can’t really afford to unfollow for two reasons:

1. They’ll eventually notice. Some people scour their list of followers daily to see who’s in and out. Others, who may be less OCD about the matter, will eventually come to realise that you aren’t replying to their public tweets. And because it’s either personally or professionally unwise to put yourself in this awkward situation, you continue to follow every single wonderful tweet.

2. You don’t want to miss any action. Even if only one out of every 200 tweets is vaguely interesting, you feel that your life would in some way be less complete and leave you far more uninformed, without a never-ending barrage of updates from the people concerned.

So what do we do once we’ve identified someone who just doesn’t do it for us anymore? Do we ruthlessly unfollow, whatever the consequences? Do we DM the friend or colleague with a nicely worded request to cool it?

In most cases, no. We just do what we did yesterday: religiously read every one of their 140-character burning arrows, swearing to yourself that you’ll be unfollowing them one of these days. Tomorrow. Or the next day.

Or the next …