Why I Stopped Tweeting

In February I asked myself the question "To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?"

For 3 months I embraced Twitter and evangelised it's benefits. I tweeted several times a day every day until one day I stopped. Completely. I even went to the trouble of removing every tweet from my timeline.

Why?

It's taken several weeks to figure out but there are several reasons;

1) The catalyst was a blog post that I read called "Why Twitter Is Evil". Ironically I found this post via Twitter. It was this post that got me thinking.

2) I had always seen my Twitter account as an experiment. I wanted to understand how individuals and companies were using it socially and  commercially.  In my line of work I need to know. I now felt sufficiently knowledgable on how all worked and I'm impressed at the power of the network to pull reach and build reputations.  My learning curve had slowed.

3) Maybe I have Adam Smith's genes because I take a view that many things in life are some kind of economic transaction. Inputs and outputs. You put effort in (or money, a proxy for effort) and you get a reward (or not). Twitter was consuming a lot of time and energy versus the return (knowledge, contacts) that I was getting.

4) Information overload. I'm a busy guy with a large family and plenty of things to cram into every day. There's only so much information I can take. It's invariably limited in depth. I,be realized I'd rather spend 30 minutes reading one quality article in a magazine or a newspaper than dip into 20 trivial tweets hoping to find a nugget.

But really, it's mainly a survival tactic. I either do something well or not at all.

So long Twitter.