The Mendicant Bug

There are tons of posts by people who have various views on how Twitter should be used.  Here is mine.  Perhaps it is typical, perhaps not.

1. I follow anyone who follows me back.  Unfollow me, I unfollow you — with very few exceptions.  For this I use friendorfollow.
2. I heavily filter the tweets I normally read using twalala.  If you haven’t used twalala, it lets you filter out phrases you don’t want to hear about (like sports stuff) and mute people who are contributing more noise than value to your twitterstream.  You could just unfollow them, but see point #1.
3. I block repeat follow/unfollow spammers.  These are people who follow you to get the follow-back and then unfollow to improve their follow/follower ratio.  They annoy me, I can’t help it.
4. Even though I heavily filter the main stream I look at, I do try to occasionally dip into my larger stream and interact with others.

I find that I have a hard time following all of the conversations in the 50 or so people in my filtered list.  It would be a full time job to follow all conversations of all 394 people I currently follow, and even then there would be tons that slip through the cracks.  So to me, the twitterstream is just that.  A stream.  You step in and experience some of the water as it passes, and then step out.  You can’t lament the water that passed untouched.

So what do you think?  Is this an acceptable way of using twitter?

P.S.  Follow me on twitter.  I promise I’ll follow you back.  Also, thanks to Daniel for unwittingly encouraging me to write this post. :)