I have around 350 people I follow, and I actually think that is too many. I frankly have no idea how some manage thousands of tweeps. How do they keep up? How can one make any actual connections with anyone when you have so many tweets to read on a daily basis?
These are the people I follow on Twitter:
- Personal Friends - Everyone looks for their friends first. It's a good way to keep in touch on the fly. If you're like me, and rarely return phone calls, Twitter is a lifesaver. :-)
- Colleagues - Twitter is a *great* place to touch bases with work peeps from the past and present. It's the ultimate networking site, in the original sense of the word. Fellow bloggers I've met at web 2.0 conferences fall into this category.
- Tweeps of Friends - Over time, this has become my largest category. When my own friends have conversations with the same people over and over again, I tend to end up following those followers, just so I can "get" both sides of the conversations. Many of these people I end up talking to individually on my own. That eventually makes them friends of my own. :-)
- Interesting People - People who mention yoga in their name or profile. People who indicate they like science fiction, Monte Python or TV shows by Joss Whedon. This is just a "mutual interest" thing. I follow outdoorsy people.
- A-List Bloggers - These are tweeps I consider gurus and teachers, people I can learn something from. My list includes ProBlogger, eMom, YaroStarak, TimFerris,ShoeMoney, IMSweetie, StevePaulina, DOSHDOSH and many others.
- Fake Persons - For pure entertainment reasons I follow tweeps pretending to be well-known characters or political figures. Among those I follow are LordVader, FakeSarahPalin, BuffySummers, Xander and ObiWonKenobi.
- News Outlets - I get a few headline links from GoogleNews, RedCross, AfricanProverbs and other media. I like that I can scan the headline tweets and stay current, in a sense, on major new happenings world-wide. And if I want to, I can open the links to get the details. MarkMeyhew, hurricane twitterer, is a unique roving media outlet by his lonesome. The Martian landers also fall under the news category, even though they are written from the "personality" of the rovers.
- Celebrities - I follow a few big name personalities like Obama, WilW (Wil Wheaton), FeliciaDay, StephenColbert and even some congressmen.
Your categories will vary from mine. And I actively prune my tweeps, as well, to keep things under control. For example, I might unfollow Fake Persons if they stop being interesting. I might remove people who seem aggressive to toehrs or purely self-promoting.
