Communication & relationships

More on Twitter Lists

The other day I made some predictions about twitter lists and after a week or so of using them I thought I’d report back at least how I was using them and how that was working for me. It’s taken a few days of use for me to sort out what works, in theory anyway, so I’ve changed thing up a lot.

Initially I made a bunch of lists like “People who I am sitting next to on the couch right now” which contained one person. This was kind of a joke, but funny enough some people started following those lists. So I did the only reasonable thing and deleted them.

Next up I made a ton of public lists. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Art, Music, Tokyo, Bikes, etc.. and started sorting my friends. This made sense because now I had some context for the peoples tweets as they’d roll up with out thinking about them. What I mean is, when looking at my “Art” list I know the people who were on there I’m following because they are in the artworld somehow. This puts some of the things they say, and some of the things I look for them to say in a different category than people who I put in a “Business” list. It’s subtle, but when you sort tweets that way you start to pick up on it.

I did this for a few days and then realized that I had a ton of lists cluttering up my twitter page for really no reason. Why does my “NYC” list need to be public? It’s just a handful of my friends in NYC who I keep up with and hang out with when I’m there – opening them up for browsing by the general public just seemed a little odd. So I went through and made my lists private.

But then I started think that was a little selfish and doesn’t really help with the discovery aspect of lists that is actually pretty valuable. But there are millions of people in NYC, and millions more people with NYC lists so that just seemed to be added to the noise. I decided that a valuable public list might be for something more niche, maybe things that people might not think of on their own.

So I created a list of vegans and made it public. This includes people I know who are vegan, people I don’t know who are vegan, celebs who are vegan, and some feeds and resources from vegan sites. It does not include vegetarian or animal rights tweet streams that are not explicitly vegan. It doesn’t include accounts I found that were named vegansomething but only had 2-3 tweets and still had totally default layouts. I hoped that would create a useful list for myself, but also for others. And people started following it right away so I think that did the trick.

This also was the first list I made were I added people I wasn’t already following, and you know, that was AWESOME! I can monitor the general overall discussion from a bunch of people without it clogging up my main page and getting in the way of people I’m friends with and know in real life. Over the course of a few days I started thinking in the same terms with my other lists – if I was only following an account because they had bike news, and I had them on my Bikes list, now I didn’t need to follow them anymore. Likewise when someone said something interesting about music or I cam across someone from a band I like, I could add them to my Music list but not worry about following them or not. It’s been pretty liberating.

Obviously this is still a new thing, but I’m really excited about where it might lead.

Things that go bump in the night

A couple just walked past my house while having a heated argument. A lot of people don’t realize that everything they say while walking down this street in Venice can be heard by any resident with their windows open. Anyway, they were arguing about if Paranormal Activity was just a movie or a real document of actual events.

He was making the point that it was just a movie, with actors and a script. She was arguing that it was a documentary made by the people in the film of events that were taking place around them. He noted that if something like that had actually happened it would be on the news and not in movies theaters. She said it happens all the time and no one covers it, but this guy was just lucky enough to film it. He said he was pretty sure there was no documented stories of ghosts murdering people. She pointed out that the media never covers important issues like that and if he wasn’t being such a fucking asshole he would go see it and would know, as she did, that it was real. He commented that nothing he could see on screen would change the facts that it is a fictional story.

She suggested that he wasn’t going to get laid tonight because she couldn’t believe she was dating such a closed minded jerk.

My guess is there’s another factor weighing a little heavier on that, possibly that he’s dating an idiot.

Going down in flames, or being OK with endings

This is a concept I’ve wanted to write for a while now, but have kept putting off and forgetting about. I was reminded of it the other day while having lunch next to a table with two girls talking about their recent breakups. Yes I was eavesdropping. Heavily.

One girl had obviously just gotten divorced and was telling her friend about some resulting confusion, and her friend had also just broken up with a long term boyfriend and was in the same kind of situation. Their conundrum was that in every relationship they’d been in, one party had done something wrong, enough to kill the relationship and cause those involved to never want to see each other again. Painful, but fairly straight forward. However in both of these girls recent relationships nothing had caused a major fracture. Rather, they had just grown slowly apart and both had realized it and decided, like rational adults, that rather than stay together in a relationship neither one of them was happy with that they should end it, and give each other the opportunity to be happy elsewhere.

The resulting confusion was they didn’t know how to treat the other person when they ran into them in the future. Painful break up exes were easy, they’d mutually snub each other and go about their business but given that they had no lingering hard feelings for these recent exes, and likewise the exes didn’t hold any ill will towards them, what the hell were they supposed to do? But this isn’t only a relationship conundrum, and I know plenty of people (myself included) who have the same kind of questions and confusion come up in regards to business in one way or another. I think at it’s core, the bits and pieces of whatever the previous situation were don’t really matter anymore, it’s all about being OK with something coming to an end.

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Taking responsibility for your own interpretations

My last post about Facebook ruining relationships (or not) got linked to about a million times but didn’t generate that much discussion. My guess is I was so long winded people either never finished it or were just too exhausted by the time did to add anything to it. That’s fine, and I’ll try and be more concise in the future. Maybe. One comment that did come in struck a chord with me and rather than follow up there I thought it deserved it’s own post. Commenter Robert K got me thinking when he said:

I once misheard a lyric by the group Stereolab. What I thought I heard was “Responsible for what I say, responsible for what I heard”, which I found incredibly illuminating. Wow. I am responsible for what I hear. Ironically, I heard the lyric wrong. The last word in the lyric is actually “hush”, not “heard”. In this case, I’m proud to take responsibility for that interpretation. But to your point, so often I forget that I am responsible for feeling annoyed with what others say or write, and it’s up to me to control my behavior, not theirs.

I’m so relieved to see someone else say this because it’s honestly something I think all the time. I often find myself in situations where people misinterpret something I’ve said and I have a negative reaction to it. I have to find a way to delicately explain that I meant something else entirely, something which probably wouldn’t elicit such a reaction. Sometimes this is because I just do a bad job explaining what I’m trying to say and sometimes it’s because people have a preconceived notion of my standpoint before I’ve said anything. It happens with business associates, friends and family. In any case it’s annoying and frustrating. How do you tell someone nicely “you are upset about something you made up in your own head” or worst “don’t get all excited just yet, you misunderstood what I was saying.”

It’s not that easy, trust me.

But this goes both ways- I learned a long time ago that interpretation was a powerful tool. Both in how others interpret you, and how you interpret others. It’s hard to control how others interpret you (hence the previous paragraph) but realizing you are in control of your own interpretations can make a huge difference in your life. This is all about trying to decode intent, but in the same way beauty is in the eye of the beholder, intent can and is often decided by the recipient. While it’s true that if you hurt someones feelings, even if you weren’t intending to, their feelings are still hurt. It’s also true that when someone is trying to hurt your feelings, simply readjusting their intent (in your own head) can soften the blow considerably. If someone tells you that “you suck” that could mean they have taken a careful look at you and found you to be sub par, and this might hurt your feelings. Or it could mean that this person just has incredibly low self esteem and the only way they can feel better about themselves is to try and push someone else down, this might make you snicker at how much they themselves suck. Not what they intended, but arguably a better interpretation, from your standpoint at least.

I think a lot of this boils down to, as Robert put it, control our own behavior. As as society we reinforce the idea that there is always someone else to blame when someone does something wrong. I don’t like to give anyone else that much power over me. If someone else upsets me, it’s because I let them upset me. If I upset someone, it’s because they are letting me do it. This is passive for most people, but when you realize it and learn that it can be an active choice then more often then not when faced with “do I want to let this person or situation upset me” the answer ends up being “no.”

Facebook doesn’t ruin friendships, being a self important asshole does

I’ve had this WSJ article by Elizabeth Bernstein called ‘How Facebook Ruins Friendships‘ open in a tab in my browser for over a week now because I’ve felt I needed to say something about it. Unfortunately due to the fact that I’ve been in the middle of traveling around the world and that the article is so massively flawed I haven’t been able to decide where to begin. I just reread it and realized what is stumping me.

I want to write something lengthy about how it’s the old problem of misunderstanding the technology and one group of people asserting that another group of people should use something as flexible as Facebook in only one way, and assuming anyone using it another way is wrong. The reason sites like Facebook and Twitter are so popular is that at facevalue they are simple, but their simplicity allows people to use them in ways that work best for them, which is rarely the same way someone else uses them. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature and something we’ll be seeing much more of in the future. Some people can’t grasp that concept and insist on thinking there is only one way to interact with them. In real life we don’t only interact with people in one way, we have a million different choices depending on the person and the situation and Facebook and Twitter are some of the first major steps towards having those kinds of relationships online as well. As a society, we never think that the person who stood in line next to us at the coffee shop, our cousin who we haven’t seen in months, a co-worker from 3 jobs ago and our neighbor are all jerks because they don’t talk to us the exact same way our closest circle of friends does, so why do we expect that kind of uniformity online?

I want to write yet another piece about how the problem lies more in how we classify “friends” online, and how early attempts at this have made the road harder, but Facebook and Twitter are more educated steps in the right direction. Before the internet we had endless ways to classify people we knew – Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, boss, ex roommate, penpal, etc etc etc. Each one of those meant something very different and we all knew it. When we moved online we were forced to decide if someone was a friend or not, with no other options. That both bumped some people into categories it shouldn’t have as well as watering down the term “friend” itself. The popularity contest encouraged by almost everyone of having more friends on a site then someone else only ads more to this. Is someone you’ve never met and never talked to a friend simply because you both have stated that some other person is your friend, or because you live in the same city? Likely not. While both Facebook and Twitter allow you to limit and adjust the kinds of info you get, and send, to different kinds of people, most folks just accept all and broadcast all which clutters their stream and makes them say things like “Why is your life so frickin’ important and entertaining that we need to know?” as someone quoted in Ms. Bernstein’s article states.

Which brings me to the crux of this – Ms. Bernstein starts her piece by saying “Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly. But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,”” Guess what, if you don’t care if someone is having a busy Monday chances are you don’t love them, and shouldn’t be considering them your friends. And I’m not saying that in a bad way, I’m noting user error here. Clearly Ms. Bernstein has made the mistake of classifying acquaintance as a friend and now she’s annoyed because she’s given them too much access. There is nothing wrong with not caring about the intricate details of every single person’s life. There is something wrong with saying every single person is your friend and then complaining that your friends are telling you things you don’t care about.

There are people I know, perhaps because I worked with them years ago, that I’m connected to on Facebook. I would not consider these people friends, we never hang out and I haven’t talked to them in ages, but I wouldn’t deny that we know each other and if I saw them in person I’d stop to say hi and catch up. I don’t care if these people are having a busy Monday and that is why I have Facebook set to not show me updates from those people. There are other people who I see on a regular basis, will rearrange my schedule to hang out with if I have the chance, and honestly enjoy the company of. These people are my friends and I do care if they are having a busy Monday.

If there was no internet and I saw one of these people in person and they said they were having a busy Monday I’d probably ask why, I might even ask if there was anything I could do to help. Conversely if there was no internet and the person driving next to me rolled down his window to tell me he was having a busy Monday I’d likely roll mine up because I don’t care. But I know someone else out there probably does.

That might sound rude, but it’s because we’re looking at this as a 1 to 1 relationship. The web, and Facebook in particular isn’t 1 to 1, it’s 1 to many. You might not care about something someone is saying, but likely they aren’t saying it to you, and there is someone else out there who does care. You shouldn’t be annoyed they are saying something you don’t care about, you should realize you are doing something wrong and need to adjust you consumption of info to make sure you are only getting info you do care about. The people aren’t assholes for saying something you don’t care about, you are for assuming they are only talking to you.

This works from the other side as well, when I post something online, be it on this blog, on Facebook or on Twitter I don’t assume everyone is going to read it. I don’t even want everyone to read it, but I know that some people are interested and for them it is valuable. Some people however think everything they put online should be read by everyone they know, and that causes problems because it has no basis in reality at all.

My point is that Facebook, or Twitter, or any other piece of software doesn’t ruin relationships. Misunderstanding people ruins relationships. Trying to put everyone you know into one cute little box ruins relationships. Assuming that because you don’t care means no one else does ruins relationships.

Facebook and Twitter and sites like them give you the chance to get closer to people you want to, more efficiently. It’s up to you to decide who that includes.

10 most annoying things people do on twitter

Here are my current top 10 annoying things that other people do on twitter, in no particular order. I of course do none of these things because I’m not annoying at all. Ask anyone.

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  1. Retweeting someone elses #FollowFriday list that includes your name – you are basically telling your followers to follow you.
  2. For that matter, listing the same people in your #FollowFriday list every single week – we get it already, move on.
  3. Auto DMs of any kind, be they of ‘thanks for following’ or ‘check out my shit’ variety – these are generally met with instant unfollows and frequently blocks as well.
  4. ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME – unless you are @THE_REAL_SHAQ this is never OK. Ever.
  5. @replying to someone’s real name rather than their username (assuming they aren’t the same thing) – thus screwing up the whole reply thread.
  6. Having a twitter stream that is 100% retweets – clearly you are boring and have nothing to say on your own.
  7. Having a twitter stream that is 100% replies, even worse if those replies are frequently to celebs and people with millions of followers ensuring there is no way they will ever see that reply – stop trying so hard.
  8. I forgot what 8 was for.
  9. Allowing spam from other services like Brightkite, Spymaster, Foursquare, etc – No one cares.
  10. Begging for retweets.

I offer this list in hopes of making the world a better place. Please retweet.