What’s your Twitter annoyance level?

So there’s a new “measurement” tool for Twitter users that gauges the annoyance factor of the “tweeps” (twitter peeps) you follow. It’s called follow cost, and it calculates your average number of Twitter updates (tweets) per day as well as the average number of daily updates for your last 100 posts to determine your short-term tweet trend. Those figures are then converted into milliscobles. According to (jeff)isageek.net, one milliscoble “is defined as 1/1000th of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble,” who happens to be a very prolific tweeter.

So, with Scoble setting the annoyance bar, let’s look at where I come in.

A mere 185.51 milliscobles per day, on average. Not very annoying, if you ask me. But the trend of my last 100 updates shows the annoyance level rising. I’ll try to tone it down a bit.

How about some of our other favorite higher ed bloggers who also tweet? Here are a few of them.

@bradjward out-Scobles Scoble in his last 100 updates — a very high annoyance level. Which is funny, because Brad’s one of my favorites to follow.

@kylejames is not far behind @bradjward, and also easily clears the Scoble bar.

@karinejoly is one of the least annoying higher ed bloggers on Twitter. But followcost fails to factor in Karine’s ability to send a timely Twitter nudge to HigherEdExperts presenters who are cutting close their deadlines to get presentations to her. Albeit infrequent, those updates can be annoying.

I understand the premise behind followcost. It’s conveying the opportunity cost of following every single update of these twitterers. But who does that? Who has the time?

Author: andrewcareaga

Higher ed PR and marketing guy. Communications director for Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) in Rolla, Missouri, USA. Slow runner, mediocre guitarist, lover of music and puns, and an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan. I blog and Tweet about #highered, #music, #gocards and #random stuff.

8 thoughts on “What’s your Twitter annoyance level?”

  1. Well I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been rather talkative lately on Twitter. Heck, I warned a new friend last night that just joined…

    Here’s another way to consider Twitter ‘conversational noise’. Using the ratio of:

    Boyd’s Twitterized Conversational Index = (number of replies made by followers / number of tweets)

    Since August 22nd (as far back as my @’s go), I’ve updated Twitter 949 times, and have had 780 @replies. 780/949 = .822

    I’ll take an .822 batting average any day.

    Love the conversation, and glad you’re a part of it. Nice post :)

    [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘1190799970 which is not a hashcash value.

  2. Hey gang. I line up almost exactly like Andrew Careaga’s numbers. Since Brad leads the pack, I calculated that if @bradjward sleeps an avg of 8 hrs a night, he is tweeting out once every 30 minutes…consistently! Now that’s impressive.

    @tom8williams

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