Twitter is a place for sharing and discovering new things from all types of people and sources.  However, there are times when the sharing is less than quality and at times inane.  Here’s my personal list of twitter updates that drive me insane.

5. Repeating Others Tweets Verbatim And Claiming It As Your Own

There are a lot of Twitter users who for lack of a better term, copy and paste other user’s tweets, then tweet it as their own. I’m not talking about re-tweeting, that is fine. In fact, I encourage others to re-tweet, it’s a productive use of the feature and spreads relevant or interesting content out to as many individuals as possible. I’m talking about the users who copy word for word the exact same tweet content as the original tweeter.

It makes me insane for a couple of reasons. First, it’s pointless. It’s hard to believe those users have nothing better to do or contribute than to copy and paste tweets from other users. Second, it clutters up the timeline/feed. I don’t need to see the same tweet 20 times within an hour period from 20 different users. Third, the users guilty of this offense are adding white noise to Twitter, meaning people stop reading and paying attention to tweets. Eventually that kind of thing hurts the overall product. If you want to share a story or tweet, then re-tweet it.

4. Any And All Foursquare Updates

This one is like nails scratching on a chalkboard. I could care less who ousted who as Mayor of somestupidplaceville. The words ousted and Mayor were gradually gravitating to my list of hated words when I started to wonder why. Then it hit me, the constant, unending, ridiculous Foursquare updates. Who is this update for? Do other Foursquare users even care? I can’t believe anyone wants to hear those updates or even cares about them and frankly if you do, then you’re part of the problem. Enough with the Foursquare updates, please!

As a side note, the EmpireAvenue updates are grating my nerves as well.

3. The Shove It Down Your Throat Post Method

Most of us have seen it. There are some users who crave attention so bad, that they need to flood the feed with posts so that they are the only ones noticed for a split second or two. They send out multiple tweets all at the same time so you’re left with a feed full of only their tweets. Other than this being annoying, I have a bit of news for users who do this — you’re probably being ignored. Everytime I see this come across my feed, I just scroll by it as though it’s spam. Now certainly I could un-follow the users in question and many times I have, but the responsibility falls on the Twitter user to control their tweets.

2. Private Conversations

Twitter has been around long enough for users to know it’s not private. Anything and everything is seen publicly unless it’s sent in a direct message. Yet, there are still those that converse back and forth as though they are the only ones reading it and treat Twitter as their own personal SMS service.

Listen up those of you guilty of this. Other people are reading your tweets and ALL of your tweets are public. If you ever wonder why someone replied to you or how they found you on Twitter, then you aren’t getting it. If you live in east-ja-bip, I and everyone else can see your tweets and we can and may reply to them. Try to come to grips with that.

1. The My Agenda Or No Agenda Tweets

This one really bothers me. Twitter is what it is and each user will define their roll in it on their own and within their own guidelines. The last thing anyone needs on Twitter is someone on a soapbox proclaiming Twitter should be used like this or like that. The audacity to tell or encourage others to un-follow if a user hasn’t tweeted in a couple days or to tweet only on specific topics or whatever other agenda they’re pushing.

What if someone has surgery and can’t tweet for a couple days? Maybe you follow an astronaut, I’ll bet at times they are too busy to tweet for a couple of days. They deserve to be un-followed? If you’re following someone, then you must have thought they had something useful to offer. If not, un-follow them, but not for some asinine time limit.

Final Thoughts

While I may hate those five types of tweets, I’ll never call anyone out and tell them to stop posting them. You can use Twitter however you like, this is just my Rant about my distaste for specific tweets.

Your Thoughts

What are your most hated tweets?  Do you agree or disagree with any of my choices?  Let your opinion be known in the comments!

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The post Top 5 Twitter Updates That Drive Me Insane [Rant] first appeared on GeekITDown Computer Services & Technology Solutions.

One repair issue that has repeatedly made me cringe and at times wish I hadn’t checked email or answered the call is when the issue is a problem with Outlook. To be clear, I’m talking about Outlook which comes bundled with MSOffice not ‘Outlook Express’ which was Windows’ default, free email client in previous versions. Clients describe Outlook problems that can only be classified as unique to their situation. The problems are often obscure and unreasonably complicated to resolve. What might seem like a simple one time error to users is actually not so simple to repair because many of the errors are not standard or generic email problems, but rather software related problems. Clients and users don’t always understand or comprehend the complexity involved with regards to diagnosing Outlook errors. Users just want it to work and understandably so, but the real issue usually resides in something the user has done or added to the system which makes correcting the issue or error problematic.

I think what’s most irksome about Outlook is that so many people continue to use it despite the ineffectiveness, constant problems and lack of resolution for those problems. I have to question why that is. Is it because it’s free when they buy MS Office for Word and Excel? Is it because they have no idea that other email programs exist? Is it because they don’t understand that all email can be checked through a web browser without an email program? Those are all valid questions and I’m going to address each one.

Free Outlook with MS Office

This is perhaps the simplest one to address. Outlook like any other program on your computer has an alternative. Let’s face it, you probably purchased MS Office for Word not Outlook, but if you did buy Office just for the sake of having Outlook then you wasted your money. Outlook is way too heavy a program for the average user. It is completely unnecessary in a home environment and most users have no idea how to utilize the full potential of Outlook even if they’ve been using it for years. If Outlook were just email and supplied extras associated with cataloging, organizing and manipulating email then it would likely be a much better program. As it stands, it is an email, calendar and scheduling program which is why so many obscure and odd errors propagate when something goes wrong.

Email Alternatives

Yes there are alternatives to Outlook and there have been for quite some time. To be clear, I’m not talking about business environments where companies depend entirely on Outlook for their company email structure. Although, they should consider alternatives such as Groupwise, but that’s a debate for another time. For the average everyday user, free programs such as Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail are available. If you insist on something made by Microsoft then use Windows Live Mail. It’s relatively simple and functions with address book, folders and everything else you expect to come with an email client. If you want to use the best alternative, look at Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is lightning quick and can accomplish everything an average user needs in an email client.

Check Email Through Web Browser

Quite simply, this option requires absolutely no knowledge of email clients, programs, software, configuration or setup of any kind. You know your email address, simply go to the host for your email account and login to check it. For example, <username>@yahoo.com. Navigate to yahoo.com and login with your email address and password. It doesn’t get much simpler. To be fair, ISPs who provide free email accounts have probably the worst interface for checking email and in some cases require specific browsers or toolbar junk, but we’re talking about the average user here and he or she likely has a free account from Yahoo!, hotmail or gmail. The best part of having these cloud based email accounts is that you don’t have to worry about storing the messages on your computer. If your PC fails, the emails won’t be lost because they are saved in the cloud.

Wrap-up

In short I can see no legitimate reason for home users to use Outlook as their email client. It’s antiquated, slow, glitchy and an absolute nightmare to diagnose. Microsoft is of little or no help with troubleshooting this program and those little errors grow to immense problems for home users who have no idea how to diagnose them.

The point of this rant is to frankly state that users, home in particular, stop using Outlook and switch to a more simple, reliable, stable option. If you want to save yourself downtime and most importantly tech support costs, you will follow my advice.

The post Outlook Rant first appeared on GeekITDown Computer Services & Technology Solutions.