NUD-- stop cluttering Twitter with sports Tweets!

Apparently today is National UnFriend Day, courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel (and cameos by Wolf Blitzer):
I've never watched Jimmy Kimmel before, but maybe I should start, because this really made me laugh.



I'm not very particular when it comes to adding friends on Facebook, but (aside from a small handful of people I met from the Grab.com days) everyone I've added is someone I know from some aspect of my life-- high school, college, Army days, grad school, work or church. And in the small town of Santa Barbara, these circles sometimes overlap. At any given time, maybe 1/3 of my friends are actually active and posting, plus I hide most game/app-related posts, resulting in a pretty manageable feed. So for me, National UnFriend Day isn't really an issue.

I personally try not to clutter my own feed with a bunch of stuff back-to-back. Lately this isn't easy to to, as I'm posting both my NaBloPoMo posts and my Project 365 pictures every day, in addition to whatever status updates or links strike my fancy. So I at least try to space it out-- with the two blogs, I try to do one post in the early afternoon, and one in the evening, for example.

Now, where I am tempted to apply NUD to is Twitter. I don't actually follow a lot of people, less than 50, in fact. Keeps my feed clutter-free and only centered around people/websites I'm actively interested in hearing updates about. And for the most part, it works.

Until sports game days roll around.

Doesn't matter what the sport is, or where it's taking place-- football in the USA or soccer in Europe, if it has die-hard fans, I'm sure a couple of them wind up being folks I happen to follow on Twitter.

Here's a newsflash for those folks: you don't have to Tweet the latest play every 2 minutes! If I really cared that much about the game, I would be watching it myself. If you've got friends who are as nuts about the game as you are, then invite them over. Or IM them, if they are far away. Why do you need to clutter up your Twitter feed with updates that only a small handful of people will actually care about!? It's annoying to have my Firefox Twitter app (formerly called TwitterFox, now Echofon (yeah, I don't get that one either)) update and load about 20 Tweets from you every 5 minutes, obscuring other Tweets and just making everything really cluttered overall.

I kind of get where Jimmy Kimmel is coming from with the useless info that can clutter up your Facebook feed, but I've found that by and large, most people don't update their statuses as often as they do on Twitter (and I actually enjoy hearing the "drivel" from friends-- nice little bite-sized updates on their lives, because I actually care). If anyone needs to learn to curb their enthusiasm for posting every detail of their lives, those culprits are the sports fanatics (and other similar people) on Twitter, not Facebook.

You're publicizing details of your life to what more or less amounts to the general public. Please do so responsibly... and courteously!