So since signing up to Twitter a week or so ago I now have 50+ followers, neato! Thanks all.

Since then I’ve been reading more about twitter and finding out how others use it and my own usage has even evolved during that short period. Here’s a few things of note:

– At first I followed a couple of celebs (Stephen Fry and Wossy) just to see how they were using it, but their posts quickly became boring and had way too many @someone replies which had no relevance to me and thus were just more crap to wade through. So I’ve unfollowed them. I’ve also learnt not to make loads of @someone replies in my own Tweets.

– I didn’t follow many people at first because I didn’t want it to be like a new in box to be processed, but now I’ve followed a few more because I’ve found their posts to be highly relevant to me. I’m following some friends, new agey people, blog experts, and programmers pretty much. For now that’s a good mix for me and I’m enjoying it. I prefer positive/funny or useful Tweets to negative/boring ones so will unfollow anyone that fails to meet those criteria.

– To find out who I might be interested in following I simply looked at who was following me and then checked out who they were following. If I recognised a name or the name sounded like they would be interesting (because it hinted at what they did) then I checked out their Twitters (and blogs) and followed them if they were good. I know there are other ways to find people to follow but I haven’t needed to use them yet.

– When some friends/associates followed me I sometimes felt a sort of (self-imagined) social pressure to follow them, but I didn’t always. I’ve noticed that some people always follow everyone that follows them. This seems to be called reciprocal following, but it seems crazy to me as you’ll soon build up way too many people to follow effectively.

– Some of my followers seem like people who are interested in my blog and company but a lot of marketing/SEO types also seem to follow me. When I look at their details they often have 10,000+ followers and are following a similar amount of people. I’m pretty sure they are just following me for some kind of marketing ploy or in the hope that I’ll reciprocate follow. I haven’t blocked these people (yet) as they boost my numbers. We’ll see if they become annoying in some way, but hopefully they won’t.

– I can post to Twitter from my iphone using some voice recognition software. This is pretty neat but I haven’t used it much yet. Most of the time I just post via the web direct on Twitter.com.

– There are tons of twitter apps popping up all over the place, many are web-based apps. One called Tweekdeck allows you to follow tons of people in a more organised manner. I haven’t used any apps yet though, perhaps I’ll see something really cool soon. I just use Twitter.com to quickly browse tweets of the people I’m following and click I links of interest to check them out.

– I haven’t received many messages so haven’t entered into many conversations. That’s OK though as I might kind of find it a hassle replying, like dealing with email, but then again it could be fun. Some of the messages I’ve had so far have been good and prompted me to post decent replies (like someone asking for links to the stuff I was reading etc).

– It does seem to be a bit addictive but it’s not too bad, I have it under control 🙂 I’m just interested in why it’s so popular and what sort of usage patterns are emerging from it.

– How will I use it in the future? Well I don’t really know. At the moment I guess I’m using it as a sort of RSS feed to get bits of useful information from other people. As for my own tweeting I’m posting useful information, links to my blog posts, news about me and the occasional piece of advice. My future use may well change.

Please share your twitter experiences with me as I’m always interested in hearing how other people use it. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 4:06 am and is filed under Grey Alien Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.