Affected by Twitter

I think that anyone who is paying attention to social media news knows that there’s a change in leadership at Twitter. Stuff like this happens and normally life moves on.

However the new direction indicated a few things were going to change. To be honest, I looked for them and they really weren’t all that obvious. Those close to me know that I have an outstanding support tag and it hasn’t been addressed as of yet. In the meantime, I’ve found a workaround that I believe mostly works. At least, I haven’t heard of any complaints.

The biggest change that I’ve noticed though is the constant flow of requests for friendship from really bizarre profiles. My wife says that I’ll friend anyone but that’s not true. I do narrow my focus to educators that I can verify as such. Of course, if I know you, I’ll friend you immediately.

I’m just not interested in people with blank profiles or all these crypto-requests that I have no way of verifying. Personally, I don’t roll that way.

All of this has been mostly manageable although I would argue that a successful network should just work and not need to be managed. Especially in these days of artificial intelligence.

But, yesterday, as I was doing my weekly summary of events, I did get directly affected by the changes at Twitter. Those that know me know that I spend a bit of time on Friday acknowledging Ontario Educators who have been active on Twitter. They’re tagged as such on my timeline and I know that it’s noisy but it’s only for a bit. I’ve always liked the concept of promoting active educators on social media and have encouraged others to make connections.

When I started promoting this, I wanted to show what it looked like in presentations. Screen captures just weren’t cutting it and that’s when I went looking for a better solution and found Wakelet. It was exactly what I wanted.

Wakelet is a fantastic tool that lets you create collection of resources on various topics. You can poke around there and find that great people have curated and shared various things. Including me.

One of the things that I curated was the weekly #FollowFriday Twitter messages. A look at my accounts shows that I’m pretty faithful about it.

Open one and you’ll see nicely collected messages. They’re actually live which I find impressive.

In the beginning, I was faithful about creating the collection when I was done on Fridays. Then, I got a little lazy and switched by going through my Twitter feed and creating the collection as I write my Sunday afternoon weekly summary. It still worked so that was good.

The display looked great when doing presentations.

I could send people to the open collection or to any particular week.

Life was moving along and I could reliably create these collections – until Sunday morning. When I got down to work, instead of looking through my timeline, I got this message:

At the time, I was using my Chromebook which really isn’t ideal for this sort of thing. Yes, I installed the extension and yes, I could find the message one at a time and add to the collection. It was tedious and I gave up.

Now, part of this is the fact that I waited until Sunday to pull them all together. I have no doubt that it would be easier to manage if I added each message as I enter it and I’ll probably give it a try next week. It’s just frustrating to have to rework what was a well-functioning routine.

I’ll be honest, after the changes and threats of more changes at Twitter, I felt largely unimpacted. Now that I am feeling the impact, it does feel strange, like a long time friend all of a sudden turned on me.