I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion about etiquette (please don’t tell me ‘twetiquette’ is a word!) on Twitter, and I am looking for some guidelines about good practices.

A few things that bother me about Twitter, even as I use it for a variety of reasons.

• The constant use of the @ sign to acknowledge someone  in a tweet. This kind of name dropping is just visual clutter in such a format
• The volume of re-tweeting that passes for useful contribution.
• The cut-and-paste tendency of those prolific micro-bloggers –especially those who are auto-generating posts.
• Hash-tagging – another bit of visual clutter

Speaking of hash-tags, I recently did a Twinterview, and found myself revolting about the need to drop in the tag #twitview, which I know is useful way to follow the conversation later. But it’s akin to prefacing everything you say with “Listen to me!” before every word you say (or the irritating “I’m glad you asked me that question” line some speakers use to every question asked by the audience.)

I know, as we grow more attuned to the format, and wean out our follower/following list, things will get better. Remember, blogs back in the day also struggled with these naval-gazing, clumsy tone-of-voice issues. Until then (note to self, here) let’s try to use a tool like Twitter to prune, rather than clutter the conversation.