I'm going on a Twitter Diet

I've been shocked by how swiftly Twitter sank its teeth into me. For the first few weeks, I was in and out of Twitter every few hours, sometimes every few minutes. I 'followed' eagerly at first. I found friends, colleagues and associates, local information on my borough, people who Tweeted on marketing topics and social networking trends, business networking and entrepreneurial Tweeters (or is that Twitterers?) and home-workers who told the world every time they went off to make a cup of coffee (yes, really); I even found a cheery elderly lady who Tweets from her nursing home. Soon I was following almost 50 people. For those who 'follow' thousands of people, that might seem a little sparse, but I naively assumed one should actually read the Tweets of those people one follows.  OK perhaps that's just a bit obsessive-compulsive...

People use Twitter in many different ways though. There’s a place of course, for people who want to follow and be followed by thousands, but I’m not one of them. I believe there's just so much information one person can cope with at any one time. I don’t want to drown in it, however useful it might possibly be – and in a world flooded with information-on-the-move, I've decided I'm not afraid to miss something.

So maybe I will miss the odd vital nugget by being a bit selective, but in limiting my 'follows' to less than 30, and 'un-following' anybody who bungs up my Twitter screen by Tweeting more than 6 times in quick succession (now that's another story), I'm handling Twitter in a way that just about works for me.
 

22nd July 2009