Pixelrage.net

Simply put: there’s no way to hide people you’re following. There would be drastic pros and cons to Twitter allowing this feature – but can’t there be a better way to get things done?

For starters, I don’t really use Twitter for anything but business. Having a Twitter account for personal use is rather pointless, considering how often I use Facebook (multiple times per day, every single day). For me, Twitter is a good way for me to keep my web visitors engaged on what I’m doing to update a site. That’s it.

The difficult part here is that Twitter has created a culture of “follow back.” People get offended if you don’t follow them back. Well, some do. Others will just delete you if you don’t.

So, you’re somewhat obliged to follow your followers, which in turn transforms your dashboard into an endless stream of worthlessness. Don’t get me wrong, I love my followers, but I don’t care about their lunches, current events or what their family members are doing. However, I have no choice but to see this. I do, however, follow several web developers, template designers and others who affect my business, and it’s important for me to read about their plans and updates. However, they get quickly buried in the pile.

Twitter somewhat addressed this by letting us organize visitors into buckets. This let me drop in the developers I follow into one bucket, the designers into another, and so on…however, it creates an extra step, since I’ll have to visit the bucket, and click a user to read all of their updates. It also defeats the core purpose of Twitter – being able to actually see their live Tweets as they happen.

With that being said, I’m never surprised at all of those statistics talking about how Twitter has an awful retention rate, or how they’re having such a hard time holding on to active users. At least with Facebook – I can simply “hide” someone from my front page live feed if they (or their gaming updates…or their constant selfless promotions) annoy me.