One Hundred Followers on Twitter. But Why?

I now have 100 followers on my Twitter account. I’ve no idea why. I still don’t fully “get” Twitter. I only follow 4 people, and two of them hardly tweet anything. The other two are quite chatty, and I have bother keeping up with everything they put out there.

Some people follow thousands of other Twitterers, which begs the question “How do they keep up?”. The answer must be they don’t. I think they use some filtering stuff so that certain words in Tweets cause those to bubble to the surface. This means that lots of tweets go un-noticed and ignored. That bothers me for two reasons. One is that when I’m having a conversation with someone I think it is bad manners not to listen to what they say. I wouldn’t feel right following someone and then ignoring them. The second reason is that I’d hate for any of my deathless prose to be ignored by anyone else.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the whole thing, but at the moment I kind of regard Twitter as the digital equivalent of standing on top of a bus and shouting things out. And we know what we think of people who do that kind of thing.

Anyhoo, I’m going to keep putting the odd (and I do mean odd) tweet out there. Just as I’ve found that writing a regular blog has vastly improved my writing style (you might disagree) perhaps regular tweeting will improve my “Shouting on a bus” technique.

Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

I see Twitter as a bit like shouting on a bus but blogging a bit like giving a speech on a public street corner. Both a little unusual but one longer than the other. In any case I am quite willing to accept that I am a bit on the unusual side. As long as my wife still loves me I'm ok with that. :-)

[Edd Slipszenko]

I think you'll start to get it a bit more when you start following some of your followers (http://twitter.com/slipszenko, this may be a hint, :P) and start talking to them and using it to gauge people's opinions or organise events. That is were twitter really starts to excel and you start to get it.

It's also pretty good when you find something you want to share in a more direct manner than digging it (http://digg.com/).