Toronto was truly embraced by different conferences and events this week. There was the Information Architecture Institute’s Idea09 for information architects, social media and interaction designers, and Mobile Innovation Week for several events including Mobile Media World. There was also CaseCamp for everyone interested in social media and “the nuances of Internet culture”, as the organizers put it themselves.

I spent all of yesterday and half of today at Idea09, then switched to CaseCamp after lunch to check out a couple speakers there. While at Idea, I did what many others were doing – I tweeted quotes, thoughts and comments on what I was seeing and hearing at the conference live on Twitter. In total, I sent 36 updates yesterday and 36 today, the majority of which were from Idea09, sent with the #idea09 hashtag.

Today my tweets from the conference prompted a co-worker, who follows me, to tweet that the constant stream of updates is annoying him and that I should “censor” myself. Meanwhile, there were a couple dozen other people who were actively re-tweeting and following what I had to say from the conference, and I added 35 new followers during the day. So I quickly replied to my co-worker by saying that I understood his personal concern but that he should simply tune out the #idea09 hashtag if he didn’t want to read those tweets.

That prompted Christian Crumlish to point out that there should be a way for Twitter users to mute hashtags they don’t want to follow – an obvious opportunity for Twitter app developers or anybody else who would want to add this simple feature (that should already exist).

In no way do I mean to say that what my co-worker was saying was pointless. But the simple beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow people you don’t want to follow. Among my followers, I understand that I have different people with different reasons for following me. I know that some follow me because of the things I say about experience architecture and design, some others for the tweets about mobile, and then there are others who follow me simply because we’re friends in real life. I know that not everyone was interested in reading my tweets from Idea09 today, and if some of those people stopped following me because of the high number of conference updates, they had every right and ability to do so.

I think what I’m saying here goes back to some of what Luke Wroblewski had to say as part of his presentation at Idea09 yesterday: the connections that people make on Twitter are 1-way, as opposed to the 2-way model on Facebook. If someone decides to follow me on Twitter, they can just go to my Twitter page and hit ‘follow’. There’s no “Confirm” or “Ignore” like on Facebook, there’s no message I need to reply to before they can follow m.

I think that’s something that my co-worker hasn’t fully understood – that and the fact that Twitter is indeed different to full blogs online.

The signal-to-noise-ratio on Twitter is quite low (the higher the ratio is, the less obtrusive the noise is, right?) because of the nature of the service. While I do try to concentrate on just a handful of things, such as UXD+IxD, mobile and sometimes local, Toronto news, in my updates, I don’t tweet about just one topic. If you decide to follow me for just one topic, you’re gonna have to learn how to tune out the rest, or otherwise just stop following me when the topic’s not interesting or the update frequency gets too high. You’re the follower, and you’re in charge of who you follow.

Karri Ojanen