Twitter is an interesting and still relatively new social media tool. Great fun and useful. I enjoy it and there’s much about Twitter that’s worthwhile. It’s amazing what you can say in 140 characters. And I find it fascinating how quickly you can detect what makes people tick, what they’re personality is like and what values they hold, just in a few tweets. It’s also truly social media, meaning you can connect, possibly directly interact, with famous, powerful, distant people you wouldn’t typically engage in any other way.

But if you use Twitter for a while you’re bound to develop a few pet peeves, or “Tweet Peeves.” Here are ten of mine:

· Following a promising bio and it turns out it's a front for ads.

· Following a notable individual, then reading a tweet "from him/her" written in third person, i.e., a ghost-tweeteer.

· Following a theme but getting spammed.

· Answering people’s direct message questions and never hearing from them again.

· Tweeters who never offer original thoughts or material, just compilations of what others have done. This material may be intriguing, but you wonder after awhile what the tweeter thinks.

· Following a person or organization hashtagging a theme of interest to you, then discovering the hashtag is being used by the tweeter to assure his or her message, which has nothing to do with the hashtag, appears in hashtag searches.

· Multiple tweets listing nothing but wall-to-wall thanks for RTs. Give it a rest or thank them via direct mail.

· Spam-a-palooza. If this keeps happening, I un-follow.

· Vulgarity. I can take it if it seems to fit a given context, but if it becomes a pattern I un-follow.

· Tweeters who want to be followed but never follow. In other words, they’re enamored of the sound of their own voice.

Twitter culture is still in its infancy, so it will be interesting to see how it evolves moving into adolescence and beyond. Tweet on tweeple.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010

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