On Twitter

As I mentioned in the previous post, I tweet. I don't tweet a lot, but I certainly tweet more than I post here. I also use it more than my immediate group of friends.

I have 104 followers. People who hang on my every word (except they don't.) And I follow between 110 and 120 people at any one time. That, for me, is manageable. I read pretty much every tweet on my stream; I may not read them as they happen, but I do read them. It doesn't take too long either.

A while ago I started an experiment to follow more people to see what the limits were. Turns out that when you do that something exponential happens. More and more people follow you, and the cycle continues. Forever growing. Well, not forever. I've seen these types of account, and they hit a limit around 3500. There are 3500 idiots you all follow each other. And most of them are self-declared SEO experts. What this means is that every post has some pointless triviality and a link to their eBook.

The upshot of the experiment was that I found that above 150 people I couldn't follow the stream anymore. My phone client refreshes every 3 minutes, my web every 2. On both with 110 people I can often go 20 minutes without a single tweet. At 150 I was getting around 3 a refresh. Too much data (and far too much noise).

Some people may be able to follow more, but I came up with 2 rules off the back of that:
1. Anyone following more than 300 people has got filters and won't read anything you post.
2. I'll only follow those who interest me. If you follow me, fine. Don't expect it in return unless you have something worthwhile to add to my stream.

A final backup rule. Anyone following more than 300 people must have something very worthwhile to add as they're probably a twat. (Thanks Dave, we won't forget)

Right, enough twittering, it's time to get back to tweeting.