John Corey's dashboard

I do not know of a way to do a bulk delete of old updates. In some ways I am not sure why anyone would want to remove the old updates. They are just old conversations so they go stale. Unless someone is concerned about people remembering what was said years later, what is the point? If someone is concerned about what they have said historically it is likely they should not be sharing on Twitter or other public forums. Even if you delete everything Google and other web crawlers have already made copies and built indexes.

The Internet does not forget. – John Corey, on August 17, 2009 14:59

You do not understand Twitter. 140 characters is mostly so people can use SMS on a phone.

The follow limit is only an issue when you are following a lot more than are following you.

You can easily have conversations with people who you are not following if you want to do so.

Reduce the number of people you follow who have no interest in following you. If they are not interested in following you it says something. – John Corey, on April 02, 2009 08:55

No problem for most people. You might be looking up profiles or something else.

If you use a Twitter client application you will not see the limit issue very often if at all. Itweet.net, hahlo.com are two that you can try. The only time I ran into limit issues was when using TweetDeck. – John Corey, on April 02, 2009 08:54

No problem for most people. You might be looking up profiles or something else.

If you use a Twitter client application you will not see the limit issue very often if at all. Itweet.net, hahlo.com are two that you can try. The only time I ran into limit issues was when using TweetDeck. – John Corey, on April 02, 2009 08:53

If people are looking for a browser based interface www.hahlo.com works well. I like how you can see the prior tweet right under the reply with a simple click. It is hard to keep the context when managing multiple conversations. I use Hahlo on my portable and my iPhone. No connection to the developer. – John Corey, on January 15, 2009 18:10

Thanks for the fix – John Corey, on January 15, 2009 17:56

Not sure if you were asking me but...

I like to follow people in a specific sector to understand what they are seeing in the marketplace. They would not be customers or prospects. They might be vendors. Mostly RE agents where I am a real estate investor doing the buying and selling. Understanding the strength of the market and what techniques people are using to buy and sell.

A lot of the traditional sources can provide a macro view. Twitter lets me get a very micro view. Maybe one distorted by the fact the people I am listening to are using Twitter (early adopters, less busy as they have time to Tweet, etc). – John Corey, on December 15, 2008 16:36

Good point in the count.

If an account is suspended it still counts against the 2,000 limit on Twitter. There is no way to unfollow a suspended account but blocking it will achieve the same reduction in your follow account. Granted I am talking about me following someone who became suspended after my follow request rather than the opposite direction. The opposite direction being more on topic. – John Corey, on December 15, 2008 16:31

Your concerns are a little over the top. Here is why.

Assume that they start out with what looks to you as a normal account. They do nothing that sets off your warning bell. Then they go into full 'bad behavior' mode and end up getting suspended. Would you even know?

Most of the people who start following me are folks I will try to look at when I get a notice they have started to follow. For some that will be the last I ever see of them as they post infrequently and I have no reason to monitor each follower.

To me it is more like a cocktail party where you do not know most of the people attending. They might be listening or they might not be. On Twitter you just cannot tell who is listening in any real way. At a cocktail party you at least have visual clues.

Followers can do little harm so I do not see why it matters who follows me. They cannot send me SPAM. If they tweet a lot and I am not following them I will never know. If I follow them and find I do not like what they have to say I can unfollow them and that will be the end of it.

If I am worried about them seeing what I post I should really be worried about the whole world who is not following reading my posts as they are visible in the public stream. Visible unless you make your stream as private. While some people do use the private option it is almost the exact opposite of the Twitter model so it calls into question why anyone would use Twitter and turn privacy on. I find it very funny when I get follow notices from people who have set themselves to private. If they want a follow back they are not likely to get it given I have no idea if they are interesting enough to follow.

Better to use a facility that is actually designed to be secure rather than Twitter. – John Corey, on December 15, 2008 16:28

If you are only deleting selective updates then I believe there is a delete button. It appears when you put the cursor over it. I delete an update yesterday. I had just sent it out and I wanted to make a correction.

Do you want to delete only the updates or the updates and the account also?

Joe,

What do you mean by your question? As you note a search is highly dependent on the description. As the field is rather limited and not consistently used a search makes it a bit hit or miss. Some terms work well but other times you just need more info.

I find scanning a stream helps but it might show a bias based on a current interest. I rarely go past 1 screenful of tweets. Many folks rarely tweet so you get to see a sense of time. Others tweet so much they might still be on the same topic after 10 to 20 tweets.

Tell me more about what you are thinking.

I like the ideas.

It is a little hard to say how things will be received given the changing direction most people have with Twitter.

I would use the suggested items to better understand my community, who is on the edges and how to grow my interests or network. Right now a way to aggregate or segregate is most important. Once I have that I might then want to move to the next level where the needs are unclear.

I find that many of Kevin's comments strike a cord with me. I am doing some similar things without the academic angle. More informal might be the way to put it.

I fail to understand why people think something is SPAM if they had to opt in to read the tweets. It is not like someone can see a stream or tweets without taking action to see the info. They either auto follow, manually follow or read a stream. All take action on the part of the reader so by definition it cannot be SPAM. – John Corey, on December 09, 2008 18:12