Last night, I think I finally started to "get" Twitter! I had my window open and just randomly commented on whoever I saw say something interesting. Kind of the "bull in a china shop" approach. Had some wonderful exchanges with Mindelei (who I only know from last night's conversation), DMCordell (who I've followed on Twitter and worked with online), and many others.
The conversation was all around David Jakes' recent blog post, Tragedy of the Commons, and a blog post commenting on this from Al (no last name), Special Twitter Message.
Okay, I'm not going further down that path, but it did get me thinking and tweeting.
The question everyone seems to be grappling with is how to balance followers and following.
- Should you follow everyone who follows you? Is that a question of sociability or building your source of information?
- Should you expand your list of folks you follow and graze widely or should you prune your list to those who say something you find useful?
- What's the right number of each?
Besides my ed tech RSS feeds and podcasts and Twitter friends, I have a number of technology-focused feeds, podcasts and Twitterers. Among my favorites are Leo Laporte's collection of podcasts and GeekBrief.TV They are both Twitterers with many followers. (Check the list at Twitterholic) For them the whole point is really to get lots of followers so they can tweet out updates to their products...their blogs and podcasts which have the advertising that pays their bills.
BTW, the Twitterer with the most followers is BarackObama who is following more people than follow him ( 27,746 - 27,393). Hillary Clinton only has 3554 followers and only follows 0, not even Bill! And who knows this is the real deal....after all one of my MySpace pages is this one.
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Comments
Hey, thanks for watching the
Hey, thanks for watching the show! For me, the point of Twitter isn't to get the most followers. It's fun to see the number climb, sure, but if it stopped or dropped, I'd still love Twitter! The bottom line is it's a form of communication and community. I use it mostly to talk to people and learn things from people. For example, I found out about a program called Lostify through Twitter, which we now use in post production. Great find! That's what it's really about to me. :)