Comments on: Why Twitter won’t rot… like MySpace.

By: The pros and cons of FaceBook | Designer Pie

The pros and cons of FaceBook | Designer Pie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:01:49 +0000

[...] level-footing friend model – I actually wrote about this one in my blog post about Twitter. A downside to the Friendship model used by FaceBook (Well, most social networks) assumes that [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:15:06 +0000

I follow 3 types of people on twitter.

1) People who are effectively a real time RSS feed and provide links relevant to web design/development
2) People who interest me. I am on a lot of forums helping out with critiques and general web woes. A few of these people I bump into often and seeing what else they do through a little twitter shaped window adds a back story to avatars that I see on a daily basis.
3) Finally Stephen Fry. I think he is cool and as it is actually him tweeting, hearing about what he is up to and his interests… I don’t know. Nicely breaks up my day I guess.

I am also constantly pruning my following list. I really use twitter to learn more and connect with people who I otherwise wouldn’t. I try to read all tweets… thus keeping my list limited to those who are relevant is very important.

By: Adam Polselli

Adam Polselli — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:31:31 +0000

Hey, Dan. Great post! As you know (because we follow each other), I use Twitter. I think I most like to use it to stay up-to-date on what’s going on in the web design world. As such, I follow a lot of web designers that I respect to see what they are up to. I also follow a couple of my closest friends and some family members, although Twitter doesn’t seem to be as useful as Facebook for keeping track of these kinds of people. If Facebook is where I keep up with friends (and some family), then Twitter is where I keep up with my colleagues, I guess you could say. People whose opinions and ideas I’m interested in.

I’m definitely not the type that follows anyone that follows me. I try to keep my “Following” number around 50, as any more or less becomes a chore to keep up with. Of course, this requires that I prune my list every once and a while, but I can usually find at least one person/company/site that I’m no longer interested in following. For me, it’s a matter of cost/benefits. Are the benefits of following (insert name here) worth the cost of following (insert name here)? The cost of course being time, and the benefits being, perhaps, inspiration, pleasure, interesting links, etc.

In a way, I lose respect for people that follow more than, say, 200 others. If they do, I know that they’re more interested in what they have to say than what others have to say. Of course, a lot of the people/companies that are trying to amass a lot of followers follow everyone that follow them. I think it’s supposed to be a kind gesture: “We care what you have to say too!” Really, though, they probably don’t.

But, as you said, to each their own. Everyone has their own way of using Twitter, and none of these ways interfere with how I like to use Twitter.