Twitter Becoming Degraded?

I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my use of Twitter, and Facebook, since I wrote last week about how much more I found myself looking at Facebook instead of Twitter while traveling. I am starting to see a bit of a pattern, one that I hope to find someway to remedy. Like Techdirt has written, geolocation check-ins are definitely starting to become a problem to those of us who don’t really care to use them, or interact with them in the public space of Twitter. It goes beyond that, though.

Foursquare and Gowalla are, at this point, the big fish in the pond of services that people use, and post to Twitter from, but I’m also starting to see a handful of people automatically posted their x-box live history, (at least I think that is x-box live…) what they are listening to on various services, every single thing they link to on delicious or share using Google Reader, when they favorite a Youtube video or subscribe to a Youtube channel, and on and on it goes.

All of these services post to Twitter, and while one person’s use of them might not seem like a big deal, in the aggregate of people you’re following, all of that “noise” makes Twitter less useful when you don’t have a lot of time, which is, let’s face it, most of the time!

So, how am I trying to fix the problem with my Twitter stream. I’m starting to unfollow people who use these services a lot. Not because they’re bad people, and not because they aren’t doing interesting things, they’ve simply allowed all of this oversharing of their online activity to create more noise than they are bringing value to me. Maybe I’m not representative of all their followers, certainly there are probably some who don’t consider all of that stuff to be noise at all, but to me, if Twitter is going to remain useful, I have to get rid of it.

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