A New Approach to Twitter

I’ll be changing my usage of twitter. Again.

1. Every twitter account I’m even remotely intrigued by, I will follow. I am cultivating my own public timeline. I want to expand what I hear from the twitter community from my own valuations (rather than external suggestions or trends)
2. I will use twitter’s “lists” feature to focus on specific twitterers that, for one reason or another, catch my attention. If anyone from twitter reads this, it’d be a great feature to have the ability to select a “list” as your “home” page. I want to easily cut the noise and receive the signal, making twitter actually useful.
3. The “reply” feature will be deprecated. If I need to reply to someone, it will be a complete tweet thought that can stand alone; otherwise, I’ll defer to the “direct message” feature. I now think the twitter team had the right idea when they “fixed replies”; without context, replies lose usefulness. Now that I stream my tweets on Leftsider, and Google shows tweets in search results, my tweets are being asked to mature a bit.

As I have pretty much abandoned twitter SMS usage (thanks, iPhone apps!), it no longer is important that I keep my following number low—especially since twitter now allows me to select which tweets to send. A lot of people who were snubbed or axed by my notorious “following 79” rule may find themselves back on board. This, I expect, will also affect my recent follower plateau.

From a few random strangers to practically everyone I meet these days, twitter certainly is a different animal. I’d be interested in knowing how other people are taming the beast.