Every Twitter user has heard it, or experienced it ourselves, the complaint that Twitter has become too noisy, too spamming, too much about just pushing links and not enough about actual people expressing actual thoughts. The problem however isn't Twitter's, and Twitter shouldn't have to become like Google+ to "fix" it.
This post is inspired by a wonderfully titled MG Siegler post on TechCrunch "Asking Twitter to Commit Suicide With a Google+ Dagger" (the slug is even better: .../dont-drink-and-power-use/). In hit he counterpunches some of Robert Scoble's criticism of Twitter as it compares to his experience on Google+. One criticism in particular bothered me:
I look at Twitter and a lot of it has turned into a boring RSS feed.
As MG rightly notes, that issue could be quickly solved by simply dropping some of the tens of thousands of accounts Scoble has on his follow list.
The issue to me is starkly simple: if you don't like the endless spewing of auto-post links that dominate your Twitter feed, that's your fault, not Twitter's. Last I checked, Twitter had a fully opt-in social model - you get to pick and choose who (or what) you follow. If you start to notice you are being bombarded with auto-post links, just unfollow the offending accounts. Do it enough times and problem solved.
On my own Twitter account (@kevinbriody), I rarely follow blogs or publications for that very reason. I don't want the wonderful variety of comments and opinions that the actual people I follow on Twitter to get lost in the morass of potentially interesting by way too frequent content updates that many high-volume group blogs and site push out.
In short, I simply don't treat Twitter like an RSS feed. I follow people (and some brands and agencies) and not firehosing blogs. If one of the accounts I do follow starts dominating my Twitter feed, very often I'll simply unfollow them as part of an effort at constant curation. If I still value the content, or if I want to subscribe to a blog such as Mashable or TechCrunch, I'll subscribe to their RSS feed using a tool specifically designed for that purpose, such as Google Reader.
It's remarkably simple really: If you don't like Twitter as an RSS feed, stop treating it like one.