Lonely? Turn Off theTV and Log On to Twitter
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Sample the collective wisdom of humanity
There's no better cure for watching senseless TV "for company" than watching too many "Tweets" on Twitter.com
Twitter, often described as a "microblogging" site, is a never-ending stream of short posts from around the world. Twitter is a little over one year old and it has spawned an entire industry of satellite sites that show Twitter members locations on maps in real time, track "memes", popularity of high-visibility people and generally mix (or mash) the Tweets with other data.
Beating the old battle horse of mine, "Internet as stimulation for the aging brain", Twitter is different things to different people, of course. Still, even as an outsider, you owe it to yourself to take a look at it and try to glean a few good commenters' names to follow. You will then automatically see their lifestreams go by, for better or worse.
Why would you want to drink from this veral firehose? If you have a network of friends who are also a part of this network, then it will be obvious to you, but if you know absolutely no one on it, you can still benefit. Why would anyone leave a TV set on "for company" or listen to talk radio you don't care about. Why watch the Weather Channel because you have no life when you can look at real human beings expressing themselves, occasionally in a compelling manner.
Sign up and you can express yourself as well, ask questions, make comments and attempt to become a part of the rainbow progression of verbiage. Some things need to be sai, however. First, in recent months, Twitter has fallen victim to a new type of spam. People using scripts (or even manually) follow as many thousands of naive users and many of these think it necessary etiquette to then follow the person back. Except, the "person" is often "Channel 5 News", "MeetNewPeople" and countless other commercial endeavors.
Rule one: don't automatically follow those who follow you. Remember Groucho's famous advice about joining a club who accepts you as a member.
Rule two, realize that the cleverest people are followed by so many others that there's no way they will see your answers. The best way to useTwitter is really to use it with people you have already met online in some other context.
Finally, web browsers are not the best or easiest way to read Twitter. Choose one of the many clients such as Twhirl, Twitterific (no longer free, but not horribly expensive).
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Comments
Good suggestions on the follow thing. Unfortunately, Twitter is full of people who exploit it thinking it's going to help them by posting what amounts to spam instead of useful things and chat comments to friends. This is why your point is good, keep it all small lists and try to be helpful.
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dafla says:
16 months ago
Twitter has started limiting the number of people you can follow, so choose wisely. That's because there was a man who had so many followers that every time he posted, the system crashed. At least, that's what I've heard.
I try to keep my followers around 100, but you can't actually be rude and block people who are good followers. I try to keep up, but to be honest, unless you check in several times a day, even with only 100 or so followers, it gets mind boggling. I do have a few who are special, and I would never remove them.
I've found it's really helped with increasing traffic to my blog. I've only had to block a couple of people after I started following, because they were spamming their blogs so badly, two or three posts a day on writing a single post, etc.