BFTP: Improving the quality of tweets

Written long before we had a Twitterer-in-Chief...

Blogorrhea noun. An unusually high volume output of articles on a blog.

So Ole joins a monastery where he is required to take a vow of silence. Each year monks are allowed to speak only two words.
At the end of Ole's first year, Abbot Lars asks him for his two words. "Bad food," says Ole.
At the end of his second year, Ole replies "Hard bed" when the Abbot Lars asks.
At the end of the third year Ole's two words are "I quit."
"I am hardly surprised," remarks the Abbot, "all you've done since you've been here is complain, complain, complain.

Here's my proposal - there should be a five "tweet per 24 hours" limit to any one Twitter account. Period. No exceptions.

My guess is that the quality of tweets would rise fantastically. Right now for many twitterers, blogorrhea has a companion condition - Twitterrhea. Really does any really have 10-20 thoughts that are THAT worth sharing? Have thought others would REALLY find valuable?

Wouldn't all of us be more discriminating if there were a limit?

For most people I talk to (and for myself), the big information issue is not a lack but a glut that makes it difficult to discriminate the useful and provacative from the mediocre and useless. Twitter is not helping with this in the least. There is too much "I read it and now I will pass it on and get a Twitter point" mentality.

Not that long ago, print journal editors provided a valuable service - they, fairly or unfairly, helped distribute only the "best" ideas in the profession. Yes, I am sure they practiced with a bias and that some really good stuff got lost in the process, but I didn't have to spend half my evenings scanning posts, articles and applications to determine if they had value to me. The editor did that for me pretty accurately.

What would happen if every tweet cost a quarter; every blog post cost five dollars; every e-mail a dime to the writer. Wouldn't we all be a bit more discriminating in what we sent?

I would be. You may well have been spared reading this post...

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Original post October 14, 2010