Before twitter itself was a community. Now many different communities will develop within twitter.
~Jeronathan

Jeronathan, you have a great point there that I didn’t really make. Twitter is being redefined from one big group of interesting people into much smaller “tribes” (thanks to Seth Godin for the appropriate word). These tribes are mostly a combo of (a) who we already knew before we started in a social network and (b) who we met along the way until we decide to close ourselves off from the majority. That’s an interesting progression. Thanks for pointing that out.

think 300 Spartans, rather than the Persian army
~SteffanAntonas

SteffanAntonas, That’s a great analogy, and I would rather have 300 Spartans any day of the week.

I think I’m going to do a purge as well. I just hate deciding whom to drop. Nate, didn’t you create a script at one point to drop anyone who hasn’t @replied you?
~Oliver Ortega Chua

Oliver, yes I did have a script at one point. Today I can’t find it, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to recreate. It used to tell me who I talked to most over Twitter, and who talked to me. That conversation (and a few people who I manually left in my stream because they are entertaining or cover interesting news) is what I was left with. It made Twitter much more useful and fun for me. I wish I could find it today. Instead, I just leave the stream up and when I see one person post one thing that I don’t think is interesting or entertaining, I immediately go look at their full stream. If less than 1/10 of their posts hits the mark, I unfollow. I unfollow friends who post business things, friends’ companies, acquaintances who post personal things, whatever suits my interests. The thing I keep coming back to is “Is this interesting to me now?”. If not, I unfollow. Simple. I try not to worry so much about what others think. It’s not a personal slap in the face, it’s just that people talk about things I don’t really care about. RSS readers are the same way. I don’t follow certain people’s blogs… the only difference is, they don’t know that.

When I first created my account I didn’t have any idea what I would do with it. It was about a year after I moved to San Diego so I decided to seek local people to follow. It was great. I met a lot of interesting people; mostly online, but some offline at meetups. Now, my (non-early adopter) friends are on Twitter and it’s just not the same. I’ve also added a whole lot of random people since, mostly reciprocal follows, and have lost touch with the original group whom I came to know, including you, Nate. I may not have conversed with everybody all that much, but I did used to read 100% of my Twitter stream. (Now, I only read 5%, if that.)

I think I’m going to do a purge as well. I just hate deciding whom to drop. Nate, didn’t you create a script at one point to drop anyone who hasn’t @replied you?

“It’s not how many people are supposedly following you that counts. What matters is whether or not they listen and care about what you say (which usually includes conversation) and the serendipity which results.”

Spot on. The people who really care about you always make the effort to read your stuff, keep up with your content etc. And it’s always a small active core who make the difference (think 300 Spartans, rather than the Persian army). Maintaining a close relationship with the people in that core is the only thing that really adds value in the long run, IMO. That’s the argument in the nutshell — and I’ve seen this bare itself out in many different cases.

We’ve seen the studies on click through rates – across the board CTR is less than 1% for all types of users, and the CTR % ratio decreases incrementally as follow lists grow – the Sysomos data showed that that’s true twitter-wide. What’s interesting that it means that you get guys like @Jesse who created SocialToo (popular guy) who admits that even when he had 25K followers, he was only getting 20-50 clicks per link he posted – 0.2% (http://bit.ly/11FST8). I’ve seen the same in my following and I’ve tested it on dozens of other accounts – from @aplusk to @joeblog. The strategy just. doesnt. work.

When you have guys with 25K followers risking their reputations by unfollowing tens of thousands of people, you know something isn’t right.

You hit the nail on the head on Friday when you said “everyone on Twitter is broadcasting, and no one is listening”. It’s true and you can see it plain as day in the data.

You know what else…I unfollowed 12K people today…and it feels amazing. I haven’t had a single spam message since and I’ve been catching up with friends easily. Bringing back that serendipity, baby!!! WOOT.

I remember the same thing happening to the YouTube community. Independent vloggers now have a hard time competing and great content seems to get lost in all the noise. It seems to be a recurring phenomenon in all social media utilities. So the solution seems sound. Take control of who you follow. Before twitter itself was a community. Now many different communities will develop within twitter.

I gravely miss the s-factor of the early days. Remember meeting David Wallace? Remember business ideas we’d see? Gone. So sad.
~Lach

Lach, I fully agree. Meeting David Wallace was a huge highlight of the power of the “s-factor” for me. How hilarious is it that he is on the board of the very same organization that I created a twitter bot for… and we didn’t even know we were sitting at the same table sharing a coffee together until about 4 random events came together and 30 minutes into our conversation we figure that out. That’s awesome stuff and has tangible results. I’m sad to see the tool that created serendipity like that get so formalized.

my serendipity is still unwaveringly positive and strong with the number of people I meet and hear from, so I’ll keep on trucking
~DowntownRob

Rob, I don’t blame ya man. Keep doing what works.

But I’m also very choosy about who I follow; I expect that unless I’m on vacation or working at something that requires 100% attention, I’m going to be looking at 100% of the tweets in my stream.
~Brad Heintz

Brad, the way you use Twitter is the way I’m starting to use it now as well. Being choosy is the key. It betters the signal to noise ratio. And, I love that you’re unabashed about making sure the people you follow are adding value to your life. The pressure to re-follow or even follow someone because you met them once is pretty high in the crowd I run with, but I’m starting not to care anymore. I don’t add people at parties anymore. I’ll ask them what their handle is, and check their posts out later. That way, I don’t just add everyone and (literally) their dog. You’re a smart man. Better than I for keeping your stream clean and clear.

Ryan, thanks for the kudos. I find it entertaining that people necessitate multiple accounts. One is usually for the perception and publishing, and the other is our real lives. This kind of behavior deserves a book on the subject. ;)

Thanks to everyone for commenting. This kind of conversation makes my day!

But it seems everything is becoming a publishing platform … did you see this? http://econsultancy.com/blog/4771-why-facebook-could-be-the-next-big-news-publisher

I am lamenting my old facebook as it becomes a business “tool” as well.