Twitterpated

I joined Twitter a few months ago, and I’m still not quite sure I completely get it (of course, I don’t always get the remote control either, so technological advances sometimes elude me). I do tweet—am I using that word correctly?—usually updating a couple of times a day and/or responding to someone else’s tweets—but some things about the Twitter craze are kind of mysterious to me.

I read in a blog that some people feel that courtesy=following people back when they follow you, to which I say . . . huh? If I have someone start following me and I check out their tweets and bio, looking for hints as to why they would follow me (they’re another writer, for instance) and end up simply puzzled as to why in the world they would care about what I have to say, I don’t follow back. Or if their tweets look like a bunch of ad-type things, why would I want to sign up for ads? I thought one of the points of Twitter was that you could follow people without their following in return (unlike Facebook, where you friend each other). I often do follow people back if I can tell we’ve got something in common, but I’m not going to automatically follow back, nor do I expect all the people I follow to follow me.

I also have some difficulty being interested in the tweet blizzards you get from some Twitterers (I’m pretty sure that’s not the right word, but close enough). I started following one person and he/she tweeted so much that I finally unfollowed (whereas if they’d tweeted less frequently, I would have stuck with them). I’m probably missing the point of Twitter entirely to be impatient with tweet blizzards, but sometimes it’s just too much. Since this person hadn’t followed me back, I didn’t feel guilty unfollowing. By contrast, now there’s someone I started following, figuring their tweets would be entertaining, and when I found out I wasn’t interested in most of them—batten down the hatches! Major tweet blizzard!—I felt too guilty to unfollow them, since they’d started following me. So I remain huddled in the tweet blizzard, knowing if I’m going to be this neurotic then I need to learn how to create those list thingies so I can quietly sideline the tweets I don’t really want to see. Yeah, I’m kind of pathetic, I know. But now you know the secret of getting me to keep following you—just follow me back and I’ll feel too guilty to unfollow you, even if you tweet 7000 times per day and never eat or sleep.

The tweets I like the most are the amusing/interesting personal comments or announcements from people I have some kind of connection with, even if I only know them via cyberspace. Rob is someone who uses Twitter in a way that appeals to me. He's blogged about social media before--sorry; I'm way too lazy to find any of his old blogs and link to them now--but he knows what he's doing and I like how he operates on Twitter. I'd follow him even if he hadn't threatened me with social ruin and ostracism if I didn't. I follow a couple of literary agents who are entertaining and interesting. I tried following a major publisher, but unfollowed when I realized I wasn't interested in most of their many tweets. Same with an industry publication. At this rate, I'll never become a champion Twitter person.

So if you’re a Twitter person, what do you think of it? How do you use it? Do you tweet often? Rarely? Whom do you like to follow and why? I’m curious to get some other opinions on this.