Why I’m Tempted to Unfollow You on Twitter

People like reading tweets that make them learn something new: a good article, a new perspective, an interesting photo – anything that adds to their current “knowledge base.” At least that’s how I use Twitter.

To come up with this list, I just had to think of what other people share that 1) doesn’t add value and 2) even blasts negative energy out to whoever reads it. If you haven’t done any of these things, you’re awesome. Give me your Twitter username!

Now for my list.

I’m considering unfollowing you because…

1. You’re constantly being passive-aggressive.

   Your hobby is to hate on someone (whether IRL or online) and tweet about it without identifying them. You usually make it really vague and specific at the same time. As in “You are so annoying. Stop acting like you know everything!” (That’s a crappy example but you know what I mean) I don’t know what or who you’re talking about (vague) but you’re talking about someone who did something (specific).

   If I don’t really know you and I read this tweet – what value do I get? I just know you’re hating on someone and you’re telling the whole world. It makes me wonder if you’ve actually told the person involved (the decent thing to do) or I end up asking myself why you’re even telling us in the first place.

   Has social media turned us all into a bunch of cowards constantly asking for sympathy and attention from our friends/followers?

2. You like to whine… a lot. That, or you’re too emo.

I don’t think I need to explain this one. Who likes seeing multi-tweet rants? You whine about your job, your friends, the weather. I don’t know if you’re trying to make me feel better since I’m not complaining about any of that, or if you just want to share your misery… Eeyore.

Emo tweets are even worse. If you’re lucky, it could even be a combination of being passive-aggressive and ridiculously heartbroken/sad/lonely.

3. You talk about yourself 99% of the time. You even retweet compliments about yourself.

Do we really need to know that you have followers who think you’re the best this or that? If you think we absolutely must, here’s a meme that really captures how I feel for you:


I say I’m tempted to unfollow because I probably haven’t unfollowed you yet. I have hope that one day you’ll share something really interesting, or funny at least. If not, maybe I’ll just use it to my advantage. A Twitter friend once told me this when I told her I use the mute function on Twitter:

@Skushno ignoring & being tolerant is better practice. But mute helps us focus.

— Katherine G. Pe (@bridgeutopia) November 15, 2011

It’s tough being tolerant but I like the idea. Not trying to be cheesy here but it does teach us how to be more patient and understanding. Not everyone will behave the way we want them to. Besides, it’s Twitter anyway so if you still don’t share anything interesting and continue nurturing your Debbie the Downer side, then I’ll just hit unfollow.

No one should take being unfollowed personally. Twitter lang, walang personalan. :)

P.S.
I now use Tweetbot for my phone.

Posted on Jan 29, 2012 in Social Media, Thought Posts, Twitter | 4 comments
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NowShowing.ph iPhone App Review

You don’t have to think hard about what this app does as you can tell by its name but to be extra clear, this is an app that you use to check out what movies are (surprise!) now showing.

NowShowing is a Days of Thunder project by ProudCloud, a Manila Ruby on Rails shop. (I once asked what a dev shop is so if you’re asking the same question, that basically means they do dev work, in this case RoR, for clients.) Days of Thunder happen every Thursday and Friday at Proudcloud when engineers get to work on what I call “side projects” that are not for their clients. This one is from their website:

Thursdays and Fridays are Days of Thunder at Proudcloud dedicated to internal projects, dangerous experiments, and building stuff we can contribute back to the community.

Giving back to the community is a cool idea that somehow reminds me of Taxikick and TrafficDito. (Disclaimer: I work with the team behind TrafficDito so you can consider this as my mini-product placement for the 2 readers of this blog.)

NowShowing the iPhone app isn’t the first movie guide app in the Philippines. I, together with a couple of iPhone-using friends, have been using ClickTheCity to check movie schedules. So when this came out, my first question was, “How is this different from CTC’s app and why will I add more apps to my phone when I already have one that does the same thing?”

Ask no more! Here’s a quick list of things I found more interesting about this app:

1. Movie reviews come from Rotten Tomatoes. I like this because I trust the Tomatometer and that’s how I decide whether I should see a particular movie or not. I know that CTC also has their own “Critics Rating” by Philbert Ortiz Dy but yeahh… Not a lot of people know him. Plus points for integrating Rotten Tomatoes with the app. But wait, what is this I see?

   

   How can there be zero ratings for those 2 really popular movies in the US? A quick look at RottenTomatoes and I see Alvin and the Chipmunks got a terrible 13%. Not sure what went wrong here but there goes their first advantage.

2. You can watch movie trailers within the app.This is something CTC doesn’t have and something that’s really useful. This is actually how I saw the trailer for A Mother’s Story and thanks to this app, I have decided I will not watch it.Except for that minor issue with the message that tells me I have to watch it on YouTube (I thought it will launch the YT app), everything was okay.

   

3. You can access the map for mall addresses right from the app. CTC doesn’t have this either. Some people might not find this too useful though since it’s likely that you already know where all the malls are but for the noobs out there, it’s a pretty cool feature.

   

I downloaded this app a couple of weeks ago and so far I have been using it mainly because CTC’s app is annoyingly slow (they show you their mobile ordering ad first before allowing you to access the app). Only then do I remember I have a faster loading app but then I see the faulty RottenTomatoes review rating so I end up going to RottenTomatoes.com to check. Aside from that issue, it does what it’s supposed to do. It’s a good app for movie buffs. :)

If you’re interested in the nascent “tech scene” we have here in Manila, I found out about NowShowing from an article on StartupPhilippines.com. You can also check out StartupDigestPH headed by John Arce.

Why Scheduling Tweets Sometimes Sucks

I discovered tweet scheduling  early last year thanks to Flowtown’s timely.is followed by buffer a couple months later thanks to some Twitter friends.

For those clueless as to what these things do, they basically just schedule tweets so that even when you’re sleeping, sick, or working (you can’t after all, get shee done if you’re tweeting the entire day – unless your job involves tweeting), you still seem like the ultimate Twitter pro… or addict – awake and active all hours of the day. (You can now use the motto “Sleep is for the dead.” on your Twitter bio although I realize some people really just don’t sleep.)

If you’re wondering what the difference is between these tweet schedulers and popular Twitter tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck, the latter two are not only social media dashboards, they also allow you to schedule individual posts to be published to whatever social media account you have at whatever time you want.

Buffer works the same way in that it allows you to schedule your tweets (or Facebook posts) but  with this one, you only tweak your “tweet times” once and after that, your job is to just keep feeding it tweets then it queues them for you.  The only downside is that you can only add 10 tweets per day. If you want more then you’ll have to start paying $10/month to get 50 tweets.

Timely on the other hand schedules them for you based on your “best” tweeting times.  It analyzes your past tweets (199 to be exact) and determines when you’re most “retweetable” or when your Twitter audience responds to your tweets the most. And while you can feed it as many posts as you want, it can only tweet them out as much as 9 times per day. Timely also does this for your Facebook posts.