Jason C. Romero's Website

The ease of sharing our lives brings with it the dilemma of how much of the hose to unleash on our followers.

I myself have two Twitter accounts for precisely this reason. I use one Twitter account to post “important” updates I want everyone to see — these updates also eventually make it onto my blog. My second Twitter account is for “less important” updates, which tend to be more personal (if you consider pictures of my food to be personal), more frequent, and, in general, less filtered. It seems it is common for people to have more than one Twitter account, though I’m not sure if it is necessarily for this reason.

What I find intriguing about all of this is that it is the result of an attempt to “customize” my audience’s experience for them. I know that what I emit is subjected to a perpetual pleasure calculus, so I try not to overburden my audience. This goes beyond merely expecting the user to customize their own experience but preemptively attempts to make things easier for them on their behalf.

That said, I enjoy seeing the different forms this preemptive customization takes. One blogger follows a similar practice of importing their tweets into their blog, but they exclude the tweets from their RSS feed. They explain, “[My tweets] show up on the site, so people who visit the site regularly to see what I’ve been writing will see my latest microposts, along with the regular big old blog posts. But the microposts won’t show up in my feed. That way, no overlap for people who subscribe to my feed AND follow me on Twitter.”

Another blogger experimented with having their tweets show up in their blog, but eventually decided against it. The first reason for eventually deciding against including the tweets states, “Content Not Interesting or Valuable to Readers,” and the examples they link to bear this out to be the case. However, I wonder if they would have overcome this issue if they had decided to have two Twitter accounts — a main account and a noise account — like I do, though this does lead to other non-blog related management issues of its own.

Unfortunately, not everyone is so caring about their audience. I am aware of one blogger that includes his tweets in his Tumblr blog. This alone is not unusual. The problem is that the tweets are unmarked in any way which makes it difficult to filter them out of the blog’s RSS feed. Fortunately, I was able to use Yahoo! Pipes’s regex feature to filter out any blog posts that are less than 140 characters, which prevents me from receiving duplicate tweets.