I’ve found the TweetDeck Twitter client to be really helpful with this b/c it lets me create groups of people i follow so i can watch each group seperately. I have a Podcaster group, a Toronto group and some other ones to cut down the noise when everyone is grouped together.

This almost kind of seems to have been a taboo subject on Twitter, and I’m glad to see that other people are coming out and saying basically what I’ve felt all along. Even for a relative nobody like me, if I followed everyone back who follows me, Twitter would be a lot more useful. I can’t even imagine how Twitter has any use left when you’ve got followers in the thousands.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there may also be more people like myself, who follow people with different expectations. There are friends from home I follow and converse with regularly via Twitter. Then there are those, such as yourself and some of the other podcast authors, who I am interested in following as a means of accessing early updates on what you are working on or for the banter (between yourself, Sigler, Tee, etc.) and I don’t expect you to follow in return. Then there are those that I follow because they are just too funny (i.e. @yoda and @darthvader) who I really don’t expect to follow in return. I think Twitter has evolved from its initial intentions and along with that the expectations of reciprocal follows has evolved as well.

All that said, you are made of awesome for even taking the time to explain your intentions with so much detail and care.

Six months ago I might not have understood the reasoning behind what you had done. Now, I really do. Even at 150 followed, it can be very, very difficult to keep up with conversations at Twitter. At 1,000 or more, I think it becomes an abstraction that could distort the main twitter feed beyond all usefulness. As repeatedly said, at some point conversations become noise, and pretty soon noise becomes intolerable. When that begins to affect the content of your own tweets, limiting them to blog post announcements and little more, something’s got to change.

Six months ago I looked at some of the people I was following — Wil Wheaton, Xeni Jardin, John Scalzi — and I had the same feeling as you did: hypocrites. Why should I follow someone who hasn’t the courtesy to follow me back? Now, I have the answer to my own question: noise.

I have a friend who recently found herself trapped and unhappy with her presence on Flickr. It wasn’t an issue of having too few friends or too little attention — it was that she had far too many. People from all over the world were making her a contact, commenting on each and every photo she posted. She found herself feeling obligated to then comment on each and every photo of each and every contact. It began to consume her days, and the service went from something that enriched her life to something that was a burden. At that point, she felt she had no alternative but to basically shut down her presence on Flickr altogether. It had simply grown out of control. I explained to her that each individual must establish his or her own framework for utilizing social media sites and tools. If the tool has become a burden, it simply is no longer useful.

We’re charting new territory with these social media web tools. As they explode in popularity, the tools will have to adapt to become more versatile — more critically, though, I believe that we also will have to adapt along with them. Twitter has grown and evolved. To put it simply, you’ve had to readdress your relationship with it.

At the end of the day, if this change in your “policy” has reinvigorated your relationship with Twitter as a tool, that can only result in good.

Your craft and your projects require your time and effort and having the wisdom to know when and where to use the effort means that the projects that you spend your time on will be all the better for it.

Twitter is not AIM. It is not a chat room. It is not email. It’s not a blog post. Twitter is a lot of things, but on a fundamental level, it is simply the constant answering of the question “What are you doing?” Those that care about your answer follow you.

I follow you because I’m interested in your answer. That alone doesn’t necessarily mean that you are interested in what I’m up to. I’m not a professional writer. The day you’re interested in what a twenty-something health care software analyst is doing, that’s when you would follow me.

Besides, it’s not like there aren’t already about 12 different ways to communicate with you if we need or want to. For that reason alone, I don’t feel that it makes you less accessible. If anything, it frees you up…removing the time constraints of sifting through clutter, leaving more time for the good stuff.

All of those social networks seem to start off for us mere mortals as just that, social networks. I know that the people I started following on Twitter were others I’d met through our common interests. As I got involved in socializing with those people my network expanded as I dug into finding out about the other people they were communicating with.

My network grew.

As it stands, the podcast review show we do isn’t pulling down huge numbers, my tweet stream is manageable, and I can pretty much follow everyone who follows me. I’ve made a few exceptions for people who unintentionally spam the services with “I’m reading this article right now in my google reader” type messages.

I’m using this as a networking tool. As, I imagine, are a lot of people who are trying to promote a product or service.

There are those who come at it from a social aspect though. And in that respect, it might seem a slight if someone doesn’t follow them, or unfollows them.

It’s like the tree on Dagobah. You get out of it what you bring into it. If you turn it into a social tool and get your feelings behind it, you have to be prepared for those feelings to be hurt. If you are using it to network with your fans or those whom you are a fan of, you can’t expect that there is a huge emotional investment on both sides of that “relationship”.

Anyone who doesn’t like it, like you said, the whole following thing is voluntary and they can unfollow you if it bothers them that much. And if it does bother them that much then you’re probably better off.

I do not think this makes you a hypocrite. I think it makes you human. It was fun while it lasted, but it just becomes mostly unusable when you have that many people screaming through your head at any given time. You become like a telepath who has not learned to filter out the periphery.

So I do not think you have anything to feel bad about. YOU decide who YOU want to hear.. That’s the main strength of Twitter. Don’t beat yourself up for simply using the service at it’s main strength.

You know, I’m glad you did this and made this post. I have not yet gotten to the point where hundreds of people are following me, but I definitely can see it becoming serious noise with 500 or 1000 or more people to follow. As you say, it’s not that they don’t have anything to offer, it’s that you are only human and you are unable to pay attention to that many tweets.
Given that people can still @ you, I think it makes a lot of sense. Give yourself a break. Only Kilroy 2.0 can be “everywhere”

Sam

As you said, doing so can lead to significant “noise”.

I joined twitter because of all the talk on your podcasts. I am feeling my way around this new media and teaching my girlfriends all about it. I never expected to be followed back as I reached in and felt my way around the room. I mean what would you really get from an exchange about the new “Skinny Bitch” book? In fact, I am not sure what I get from that exchange. I have to assume I am not the only mainstream convert out there. I can imagine many, like myself, are just thrilled to follow you. Give yourself a guilt break and write, we’ll be just fine. Thank again for introducing me to new universes (fiction and otherwise).

I’ve never been able to follow everyone who follows me. I once had someone call me out at a conference about this and I explained that I follow people who I either know or that I really want to hear what they have to say. I constantly am adding and deleting people to try and keep some sort of balance between “the noise” and being a useful part of my life.

Do what works for you. Figure out which tools are best and use them. Want to change? Go for it.

Everyone needs to chill, enjoy and stop worrying about how everyone else is using things.

I only casually use twitter myself, and while I like it, it is an issue keeping up with the less than 50 folks I have on my list.

Folks have a right to change their mind.

So agonize no longer, warrior.