Do you realise how sinister that sounds?

Here’s an update to my link experiment. Out of 163 followers, 79 clicked the link that said “testing to see how many will blindly click this: ”

That’s pretty good – and it makes a case to how having thousands of followers can translate into money if I’m sending them to a page with ads on it.

The thing about Twitter is that “following” doesn’t necessarily mean “reading what these people say” – there seem to be three types of users, those who post to their followers, those who read what the people they’re following tweet, and then those who engage in two-way discussions. I think they’re room for all of these people, but new users especially need to realize that there are a lot of reasons why someone might choose to follow you, and respond accordingly.

Cumulatively, my tweets inform my followers what I think is important in our field — providing them with a sense of who I am. Sprinkled in there are some (rare) personal tweets that provide a behind the scenes view of my life and personal interests. Those personal tweets also do double duty as a release for when something’s just got to be said.

Autofollow is dumb because unfocused chatter is valueless.and silly. I’ve learned much, however, from the select folks that I follow.

It’s not a good method of having a conversation – it’s more for broadcasting stuff that people may or may not care about.

I think Friendfeed has the advantage here for comments. Their auto updating interface is pretty slick. If only I could get it to show newest at the top (there’s probably a setting I’m missing)

I just think that the site has a very limited feature set, and one that isn’t creative, informative, or particularly worthwhile in any real sense – but I’ve ranted about that before.

Your following comments are bang on, as well – but one thing you didn’t mention which perturbs me about Twitter is the way my tweets are scraped and used on ecommerce sites (as “reviews” for products I’ve mentioned) and scanned by companies looking for testimonials and me slagging them off. I was contacted by the VP of a company who’s software I publicly denounced on Twitter. Companies are now more concerned about what people think about *other people’s* view of their products, than they are with their customer’s experience itself. Not good.