20 days off from Twitter: A View From The Outside

I’ve returned to Twitter last week, after taking 20 days off, and I’m getting a lot of questions from people asking about the “outside world”. There’s a condition known by prisoners that get comfortable with conditions that return even after they are released, I’m sure they go back to tell the other inmates of “life on the outside”. It’s true my friends, there’s a very large world out there that the digital obsessed forget about.

During my time away, I focused more on blogging, a blog redesign project I’m working on, am working on a communtiy project to help people understand how to get jobs, spent time trying other tools like Friendfeed, spent time on Facebook and shared with my friends and family, and spent more time unplugged during the Holidays. When I watched what was happening on twitter from afar, I realized more than ever how much of the data that was created was pure noise, so instead, I created a Friendfeed room where I segmented out the voices of just a few people over the thousands.

I won’t be tweeting as aggressively as before, in fact according to follow cost, my daily average was 30 tweets, which has now been significantly reduced. I encourage you to back off from the social tools (life goes on) and information got to me anyways, that I realized that we’re not as dependent on these tools as you may think. I can’t step away from Twitter forever, as my clients are there, and this is a tool that I cover as an analyst, but I encourage you to try stepping away, refresh your mind, and come back more focused, I sure did.