Live Tweeting - How Much is Too Much?

I followed the recent debates over the value of live blogging with a bit of amusement. Live blogging, however, is innocuous and easily ignored. If you're not interested, just don't read it (and wait for the post-event summaries).

Live Tweeting on the other hand....

I've noticed an increase in the number of people who update their Twitter feeds from events with a minute-by-minute account of what's happening from various events - which only have interest to limited numbers of their followers.

In fact, just this morning I received around a tweet a minute for around half an hour from one culprit giving sentence fragments about a lecture. The fragments were non-sensical and really of little interest to me. What he was doing was interrupting my use of Twitter (and my productivity) with a raft of tweets that to me were little better than spam.

I'm glad he was enjoying the talk, but couldn't his time have been better served actually PAYING ATTENTION to the speaker, making notes and blogging about it later? Maybe a tweet at the end saying "Really enjoyed the talk by X about Y, will post more later."?

My choices in this situation were:

1. Turn off TwitterFox - which means I'm actually losing out on the benefits I get from Twitter because some guy I don't know IRL is overusing the service.

or

2. Un-following the culprit.

Naturally, I un-followed. He wasn't the first person to whom I've had to do this either.

The moral? It's great being able to live stream your life, but a line must be drawn between what is useful and what is spam. With so many outlets available to share information online, take a minute to consider which way is least obtrusive and most useful to the most people and use that one. Please.