Twitter: The Good & the Bad

I’ve been on Twitter for about 6 months and have a modest following. I follow a few interesting people and organizations and generally am enjoying the experience. However, there are a some things I don’t understand.

Twitter offers suggestions regarding whom to follow based, I assume, on the current list of people I follow. Today it suggested I follow @[name deleted], who notably has 297 followers despite the fact that he has not posted a single tweet. [See photo.] I am not sure what to make of this since I have posted hundreds of tweets and have only 135 followers. Does this mean that if I stop tweeting, I can increase my list of followers by more than double? And what does it say about the 297? Do they know something that no one else does, like any day now @[name deleted] is going to tweet something quite profound? A partial explanation is that at least two of his followers are friends of his and when queried, they responded that they thought he would tweet.

I suppose it also is an indirect indictment of the people I follow. In other words, the people I follow are so interesting that Twitter feels a person who has never tweeted will fit right in.

Other people suggested by Twitter don’t appeal to me because almost all of their tweets are responses to other tweets which I have neither access to or interest in. It seems to me Twitter would be more effective if people would do more direct messaging or somehow be able to direct tweets to individuals. This would significantly reduce what I call “twutter” or Twitter-clutter.

I like the idea of communicating in 140 characters or fewer. It fosters a discipline that is lacking in the blogosphere where [unreadable] blogs of thousands of words abound.