I really like Twitter because it allows me to keep up with my friends and what is happening in their lives.  In addition to keeping up on the life and times of friends it also enables me to meet new people who my friends are interfacing with.  I enjoy this peep into their lives, but only to a degree.  I want to open the Pandora’s box, but not all the way.  I want to be open about my life but protect my tweets.

And therein lies the problem.  Because I protect my twitter feed only authorized connections can see it.  I want to enable many people to read and follow my life, but there is a limitation in twitter that forces me to follow them as well.  I wish we lived in a perfect world where I could keep a protected feed, enable others to follow me, and not follow them back.  But this is a limitation of the technology.

Now I like hearing about my friend’s lives in 140 characters or less, but I want them to be succinct and keep their live media stream within those boundaries.  I enjoy reading about even the nuances of ones life but disdain being forced to wade through pages of IM conversations between two people in order to find the content I really want to read.  I loath reading tweets that read “@friend yeah!” or “@friend totally!”  To me these are pains on my existence and only worsen the signal to noise ratio.

I am forced to work within the confines of technology and simply “unfollow” these people who violate my personal acceptance for such noise.  Sometimes these are people who I don’t personally know and sometimes these are actual friends.  I am sorry that twitter does not allow me to let them see my life stream, but I find it unacceptable to follow them just so they can listen in on my life.  Why should I change for their benefit?

So that’s life and how things happen on the Internet.  I end up following more people who increase the ‘signal’ and unfollow those who increase the ‘noise’.