Twitter: Spend Less Time Tweeting

Posted 03/17/2010 at 8:46am | by Paul Lilly

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How much time do you spend every day sending out Twitter updates to all of your followers? Probably too much time, according to Twitter CEO Evan Williams, who would like to see you spend less time on his microblogging service.

"We have a bit of a dichotomy because there's more and more stuff every day that you may want to follow on Twitter, or search for," Williams said during SXSWi 2010. "Our goal is not to just maximize that -- we understand that people have a limited amount of time and attention and our hope is that Twitter can help you direct your attention in ways that are useful to you.

"So we have no interest in just increasing the time you spend on the Twitter site -- if anything we'd like to decrease it. We want to make Twitter a tool for you that helps you get stuff done."

Put another way, Williams wants to "increase the signal-to-noise ratio" and give Twitter users more valuable information with less effort. This begs the question, what exactly is Twitter?

"The funny thing about being an information network is that it's kind of like saying 'what is the internet?' -- it's an information network. 'What's it for?' -- it's kind of hard to narrow that down, because it depends on who you are and what you need at the time. And that's like Twitter."

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