Things that bother me about Twitter

Disclaimers. Doctors put in their profiles, “Tweets not intended to be medical advice.” Who gets their medical advice from Twitter? Has there ever been a lawsuit based on someone interpreting a tweet as medical advice? Who thinks of these things?

Followers and Following. Here are two examples which seem absurd to me. Last week a self-described “internet marketer” may or may not have had a “ghost tweeter” say some unkind things about him after having been fired. Or he may have done it all himself to get attention. What was lost in the mild dustup about it was that he had over 59,000 followers [down to 56,000] on the day the alleged ghost tweets occurred. He was, and still is, following over 37,000 people. I doubt that he actually follows 37,000 tweeters and many of his followers did not react to the controversy. Maybe they don’t really follow him either.

Here’s another one from a different perspective.

He announces to all that he does not tweet, yet he has 172 followers. I don’t get it. Why would anyone follow him?

Influence. I blogged about this before but now I have more data. According to PeerIndex, I have a score of 54. This places me well into the top 10% of my “topic community,” since a score of over 40 means one is in the top 10%. This sounds great until one realizes that I have about 975 followers, many of whom do not react to anything I tweet. I have seen some increased traffic to my blog after a good tweet with some retweets from more influential people than I. But again remember that there are about 7 billion people in the world. That means I might be influencing 0.0001% of the world’s population.

What bothers you about Twitter?