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Using Twitter More Effectively: Unfollow Everyone?

February 24th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter, social media

Loic Le Meur, the serial entrepreneur and CEO of Seesmic, the vlogging web application, has unfollowed almost everyone on Twitter. Until recently, Le Meur used auto-follow script that would immediately add anyone who was following him for him.

“I enjoyed it,” he says in his blog. “I thought that if anybody cared enough to follow me I should also follow them back in return and read my ‘personal firehose’ when I had some free time, instead of watching TV for example. Actually I never watch TV but you get the idea! I learnt a lot by following all my community and it has been a really enjoyable experience.”

But auto-respond tools, which send out generic “thanks for following! I can’t wait to tweet with you! Come to my site!” direct messages started to get on Le Meur’s nerves. As the popularity of these tools increased, it became nearly impossible for Le Meur to use his direct messages effectively.

Le Meur calls it “heavy robot attack,” and it sounds dramatic until you imagine the blitzkrieg resulting from the number of followers continuously added to his following list.

These auto-direct messages are not new. But they do seem to be becoming more popular. The reasoning for using them is beyond me. An automated message immediately says to me, “I’m too lazy to really get to know you.”

I’ll admit that I have 552 pending requests from people following me on Twitter right now. But I would rather browse their profiles as time allows and, if I send them a note, personalizing it based on their bio and recent tweets. Twitter is about community after all, and getting to know one another. Why should you look at my website if I didn’t even bother to personalize a message to you?

It’s spamming and I can’t think of a worse way to start a relationship.

But was that the only thing that prompted Le Meur to unfollow almost everyone?

“Following or friending thousands of friends or everybody is so 2009 [sic] and @scobleizer -ish,” Le Meur said in a tweet late last night in response to talk about his massive unfollowing on Twitter. “In 2009, we want quality not quantity.”

It goes back to the discussion that seems to have taken over in many social media circles in the past couple of months.

Blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who follows 69,304 people on Twitter, did not miss the shot at him, either. He immediately joined the discussion.

“I use tools so that I can follow both small groups and big groups,” Scoble told Le Meur in a tweet. “Friendfeed’s lists, for instance, or TweetDeck’s groups. Try it!”

But even the grouping feature of TweetDeck, a microblogging platform that competes with Seesmic’s Twhirl wasn’t enough for Le Meur to keep up with his 23,000 followers.

“I used to believe what you said,” Le Meur responded. “I was autofollowing too, this is all bullshit and you know it.”

He pointed out that Scoble himself had stopped using the auto-follow script on Twitter.

“You need to reboot yourself,” Le Meur added. “10,000s of ‘real’ following and friends are so 2008. Get over it, it is just passe, over, finished.”

He and Scoble took the discussion to the telephone. Suddenly, Scoble wasn’t so sure about his tens of thousands of followers anymore. He commented in a tweet: “On the phone @loic makes a lot of sense. Following doesn’t matter now that we have search.twitter.com and friendfeed.”

And so the “unfollow everyone” movement was born. It’s a misnomer—Loic Le Meur is still following 161 people. But you get the picture.

Scoble immediately opened up the discussion on FriendFeed, which allows for lengthier responses than the standard 140 characters of Twitter.

During the discussion, which received nearly 200 comments, artist and blogger Pete Gilbert brought up a good point about Twhirl: “Loic’s company makes a Twitter client. Surely he should build tools into that client to make the overload problem more manageable and certainly not try to set a trend of ‘hey it’s cool to unfollow lots of people now.’ That sort of sends the wrong message to people about your company and it’s thinking.”

He’s right, as mentioned, Le Meur uses the desktop microblogging client Twhirl, which was acquired by Seesmic in early 2008. How his actions will affect user perception of Twhirl remains to be seen.

For what it’s worth, in his blog post about his decision to unfollow people, Le Meur made a commitment to figuring out a way to solve the DM spam problem for Twhirl users. He also assured followers Twhirl was working hard on the filter function in a tweet.

“I am confident we will find a solution,” he says. “Until then, I will remain with a small following list that I will grow one by one daily and remove anybody attacking me again with a robot.”

As of the publishing of this post, Robert Scoble has not followed suit in unfollowing everyone.

What do you think–is massive unfollowing the way to solve the problem?

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Life In The Twitter Village

December 1st, 2008 by AV Flox in Twitter

“When the earthquake July 29th, occurred in L.A., it was on Twitter in about 20 seconds,” says Laura Fitton. “It was on the AP in nine to 11 minutes.”

Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting and author of Twitter for Dummies was on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris talking about Twitter this morning.

“I have seen first hand what this can do for people’s lives and what kind of value it can build and I’m a huge fan,” Fitton told listeners after clarifying she’s in no way affiliated with Twitter.

“The thing that’s most worthwhile is to step back and kind of forget that it’s a publishing environment,” she said. “People talk about it being microblogging and, you know, OK, we’re just pushing stuff out there–we’re really having a conversation and what it amounts to is a massive, massive flow of information between all these overlapping networks of loosely connected people all over the globe. And so there is tons of news flowing in there all the time, there’s tons of consumer data, here is tons personality, friends being made, there’s relationships being struck up.”

Fitton has always talked about Twitter as a village. Early this year, she developed the notion on her blog:

For me, connecting on Twitter with someone I’ve just met in person is inviting them to live in “my village.” Follow-up won’t be limited to the “nice meeting you” email cul-de-sac. On Twitter, we’ll cross paths incidentally and without pressure. I may bump into them “around town” for maybe a word or two at the “coffee shop” or “post office.” Over time we may discover common interests (aka social objects) in each others’ tweets, and connect more deeply as neighbors or friends.

For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building. I explained about the village to Dan Bricklin, who immediately connected it to the chapter on “taming” and the Fox in The Little Prince.

“You go back to sociological research on what’s called reciprocity,” Fitton told listeners of Federal News Radio today. “Even all the way back to the 70s–reciprocity is someone’s willingness to engage and help someone else. If you just had a little casual contact with someone, you’re much more likely to step up and engage with them. So we’re all having all this casual contact, constantly on Twitter and it’s really making people engage. And we saw people engage last week during the horror in Mumbai. People really were stepping up trying to help, spreading words, doing what they could–it’s an amazing environment.”

Yet many people still wonder about the usefulness of Twitter. Those of us who have been doing it for a while grasp the immediacy of news, the wealth of consumer data, the vast reach of information, and, above all, the power of connection. I have met more amazing people on Twitter than I have at any other place or through any other thing. But Fitton is right–to go from a ridiculous to amazing, it takes a village, “a critical mass of interesting people–to read and write to.”

“When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me,” Fitton writes on her blog. “You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.”

Image of Laura Fitton used with permission. Copyright @wmmarc 2008.

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Twittah, Plz: The Power of the Twitter Community

November 11th, 2008 by AV Flox in Twitter

I have a pretty strict policy when it comes to followers on Twitter. I’d much rather have a low follower count than let spammers perpetuate their practices. If they have no content but a bunch of tweets with the same link, I unhesitatingly block them.

The magical thing about Twitter is that if enough users block an account or notify Twitter that they’re being spammed, the account in question gets suspended.

A lot of times, though, what appears to be a spammer is a well-intentioned user who is so new, that he or she doesn’t understand how the community works and whose only crime is the desire to have their site visited.

This was the case with @lollydaskal. I saw her multiple tweets with the same link in her stream and was about to hit block when I saw her newest one: “new at twitter ….not sure i am doing it right.” I shot her a direct message. “Send me your e-mail address and I’ll help you.”

She did. In the next few minutes, I threw together as many resources and thoughts about how to get a business started on Twitter (her objective) as I could think of and shot her an e-mail.

One of the most important things about using Twitter for business is learning to step out of the old marketing model where you just throw out information about your product into the masses. In today’s world of social media, the relationship between a company and consumers is no longer a one-stop information destination. Web 2.0 is all about the conversation and building a community.

I linked some classics: Chris Brogan’s Twitter for Business, Ogilvy’s Best Practices and Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s Twitter Handbook.

Since she reached out to the community for suggestions on improving her approach on Halloween, @lollydaskal’s gathered a following of 232 people and I am glad to count myself among them.


TWITTER FOR DUMMIES

I remember thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to have all the how-tos in a single place, a catch-basin of quick, easy-to-digest information about how to make the best of Twitter, whether you’re a business or a casual user.

So today, when Laura Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting, announced she’d signed a contract to write Twitter for Dummies, I was thrilled. Like everything related to the micro-blogging platform, this is a community project. Fitton’s already invited her 8,494 followers to contribute their ideas.

Equally exciting is the recent launch of Twitip by Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger fame.

“TwiTip is about capturing some of the lessons that I’ve been learning about Twitter and how to use it more effectively,” Rowse writes in the blog’s about page. “It will cover Twitter Tips of all varieties including Writing for Twitter, Branding, Growing a Following, Corporate Tweeting and a lot more.”

These two are invaluable resources for the beginner—maybe even the seasoned user.

For example, one of the newer posts on Twitip, by Hugh Briss of Twitter Image, goes into detail about the importance of a Twitter background in establishing brand identity (some great examples of this are available at Mike Smith’s blog—with my friend Atherton Bartelby among them!).

It’s true that space we’re given for bios on Twitter is limited—only 160 characters!—and it’s been the practice for some time now for users to put much of their bios and contact details right on their pages by incorporating them into their background images. While many great people I follow do this, it’s not until now, reading Briss’s post on the topic, that I’ve begun to give it more serious consideration.

But it’s not all brand and business. And another recent post on Twitip touches on how to avoid making your followers feel like they’re overhearing one side of a conversation–I’m quite guilty of it and while for me Twitter is all self-expression, I don’t want to leave anyone out if I can include them in the fun.


TWITTAH PLZ: UR DOIN IT RONG

As more companies jump on the Twitter wagon, the wave of resistance from casual users grows. Not everyone is happy to see all work and no play in their Twitter streams. Just today, blogger Jay Hathaway posted about his displeasure about the wave of business users that Twitter for Dummies would bring about:

Predictably, the book on Twitter isn’t being written by someone funny or entertaining. It’s being written by someone who posts 100 times on a slow day, and talks about things like conversations and communities and branding and … I don’t know, money? This doesn’t seem sustainable to me. Marketers can market to marketers and make friends with marketers and talk about marketing all day, and it’s not particularly interesting to regular people.

So don’t read it, right? I don’t. But a whole lot of other people do, because they’re climbing on top of each other to associate themselves with the people who have the most marketers reading them, so that they can market themselves to still more marketers, and become what I can only guess is called Market King of the Market.

That’s the audience for this book. I’m sure a lot of people will buy it, and it will make some money for the publisher. Good for them! Also, possibly good for the future of Twitter as a business, so that it can continue to exist as a place where I’m allowed to have chuckles and make friends. Fair enough. It’s just sad that a lot more people will be on Twitter, working. No time for dick jokes, ladies, I can’t rest now that I’m in The Market. Got to rack up some more followers, and some of them might even have Secrets of Success!

He’s not alone in that, either. There seems to be a bit of tension between people who use Twitter to further themselves in their industry and those who use Twitter for fun. I have been told a few times by people that they like my blog and wish my tweets were a little more industry-focused: the amount of oversharing and, yes, dick jokes, just isn’t conducive to achieving their goals on Twitter.

I’m not offended–Twitter is all about pulling people around you whose ideas are useful or amusing. Tastes vary and I come with a disclaimer. Just as some choose to further their business on Twitter, some of us choose to have fun and be ourselves in explosions of 140 characters. I do have another account on Twitter (@omgomgomfg), which I, admittedly, greedily grabbed to protect my brand, and which I intend to develop as a catch-basin for more of the web stuff that interests me and many of the readers of this blog. Now and always, my Twitter stream at @avflox is where I let it all hang out.


THE RHYTHM, THE RHYME, THE CULTURE, THE TIME

Regardless of whether Twitter is play or work, it’s never too late to analyze what you’re doing and whether it fits into your goals for social networking. Could you put this magical tool to even better use?

There is always room for improvement, whether you’re looking to get your product out there or pick up a date. And with this in mind, it’s not hard to see how Twitip and even the more rudimentary Twitter for Dummies are going to be valuable resources for many.

The best part is that we can build this together. No matter what our focus, we are the Twitter culture. There is value in what we know and think and this platform allows for us to share it, to reach out to people we may never otherwise have met and connect in a mutually-beneficial way.

So here’s to growth—in terms of reach, yes, but most importantly, in terms of community.

This article was redrafted at 8:15PM MST to include Hathaway’s thoughts on Twitter for Dummies and my personal thoughts on play vs. work. Million thanks to Atherton Bartelby for pointing out the importance of its inclusion in this discussion.

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FookFood: Behind Open Source Food

November 3rd, 2008 by AV Flox in food


Broccoli Soup, by Jon YongFook, used with permission.

Open Source Food is a community entirely devoted to sharing well-illustrated recipes. The only thing more amazing than the recipes people share on there is the quality of the photographs users take of their creations.

Tonight, as I threw together a snack at 3:00AM, I cross-examined Open Source Food’s creator, the web developer, mastermind and ladies’ man Jon YongFook.

How and when did you come up with the idea for Open Source Food (OSF)?

Well, the basic idea was to make a recipe site that had pics for each recipe. I don’t know about you, but it drives me nuts browsing recipe sites where all you see is text. Ever bought a recipe book that had no pictures? Exactly! That’s all I wanted OSF to be–a place where you could get recipes and actually see the finished product of the recipe too, for every recipe on the site.

Had you been part of any food communities on the web before you launched OSF?

No. Funnily enough my interest in food came about quite suddenly, about 3 years ago. I never really cooked much before that, and never really watched cooking shows and what have you. Then one day bam, I was obsessed with cooking, my shelves are full of cookbooks and if I’m not watching Iron Chef or Gordon Ramsay on TV, I’m in the kitchen making something to eat. So very quickly after I found this interest in food, I started to think about making OSF, so I didn’t even have much time to get involved with other online food communities before I was coding away on the site.

How many people use OSF today and how many recipes are there?

OSF does over half a million page views per month and is home to over 3,000 recipes, each with a pic.

Some users have the word pro next to their names–how do you go pro on OSF? What features does being pro involve if any?

If your recipes receive a certain number of votes, you go pro. Being pro allows other users to find your recipes easier, since you have the option to filter by pro and non-pro users when doing recipe searches. It’s basically a quality assurance badge–if the recipe is by a pro user you know it’s going to be a good one.

Is OSF now anything like you imagined it would be?

I think it has worked out nicely as a pet project, yes.

The OSF2 launch earlier this year brought many great changes for users–has the site reached perfection or do you see more changes in the horizon?

It will change and improve. It’s not perfect in any way, yet. I want to encourage more interaction between users and have a few ideas for new features. It’s just finding the time, of course.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have encountered?

Nothing huge. One challenge was re-building the site from scratch for OSF2. The original version of OSF was built very messily. At the start of this year I rewrote the whole thing using an MVC framework called CodeIgniter. This helped standardize my coding conventions a little bit and just makes maintaining the code and rolling out new features way easier. I use CodeIgniter for everything now.

Twitter is known for its Tweet-Ups. Has OSF seen an equivalent where users get together to mingle and perhaps try out recipes?

That would be cool, but no I don’t think people have done that. This is what I mean about trying to encourage more interaction between users–I should figure out some features that would facilitate people meeting up for a cooking party.

Where do your recipes come from? Do you make them up as you go along or plan carefully?

Most of them are just kind of slung together. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to cooking. I’m not really much of a planner when it comes to anything, actually. My usual MO is to have a very clearly defined goal and then do whatever needs to be done to achieve that goal, with less planning and more of a trial / error approach.

What’s your favorite recipe and where did you learn it?

I think the broccoli soup recipe is one of my favorites. I learned it from Gordon Ramsay, who made it on one of his shows (it’s also in one of his books). I added the mushrooms, though. I just think it’s amazingly pure–the ingredients are pretty much just broccoli and water. Anyone can cook this and it looks stunning when you serve it. Tastes delicious, too.

Are you messy in the kitchen or do you clean as you prepare?

I’m very messy. If you took a snapshot of my apartment at any given moment in time, the kitchen would be the place I’d be most embarrassed about. It always looks like a bomb just went off.

You wrote a hilarious post once where you debated which dish would lead to a sexy time–what’s your most popular dish with the ladies?

I think the best dishes to cook for a lady are ones where she can join in a little in the preparation. I’ve never been on a date with a guy but I can imagine it would be incredibly awkward just sitting on the sofa twiddling my thumbs whilst the guy is frantically cooking in the kitchen. It just seems kind of false and disingenuous in a way, like I want you to sit there whilst I “create”, so you’re all indebted to me by the time I serve dinner and oh, by the way, you can pay back that debt by sleeping with me. Sod that. I like my women in the kitchen with me helping out so that when we eat there is a small sense of mutual achievement rather than an underlying, awkward imbalance of power.

One dish that goes down really well is bruschetta. It’s dead simple to make together (grill bread, rub garlic, top with tomatoes, olive oil, basil and salt) and tastes delicious as long as you get good-quality ingredients. So usually I’ll just make that with the girl whilst we chat and sip wine. And to those who have never seen it, the trick where you rub the garlic on the toasted bread almost like you’re grating it, is a really good tip–one that they can take away and use long after they grow bored of you and stop responding to your e-mails.

Have you ever considered having the sex before cooking?

Yes, sometimes it is appropriate to get the sex out of the way before focusing on the real issue: what to eat for dinner.

Got any advice for the uninitiated and culinary inept?

Invest in good salt and good olive oil. Your food will instantly taste a million times better.

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The Disconnect In The Age of Ambient Awareness

October 4th, 2008 by AV Flox in Gloom Cupboard, Twitter, citizen journo, column, faves, malwebolence, marriage, travel

Steven Porricelli has never thrown his wife’s laptop out the window, but he’s wanted to.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.


CRACK IS WHACK

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.


AMBIENT AWARENESS–AN AGGREGATE PHENOMENON

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.”

“It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world? The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.


THE IRL DISCONNECT

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”


HARD DRIVE OVER SEX DRIVE

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others. Social networking may enable us to hook up far more easily, and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships.

And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too. In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”


REPAIR LOCAL AREA CONNECTION?

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.” But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

This piece was written for Gloom Cupboard

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