Personally I’m following about 400 people and am not that bothered about seeing all tweets being made, just those that have been happening in the last few hours – I find that topic stories tend to be repeated beyond a few hours anyway, so as long as you check it at some point during the day, you’ll pick up on the good stuff – but ultimately depends WHO you follow!

I have a personal rule that I don’t follow accounts that churn out loads of tweets daily through automated means as it creates far too much “noise” in my Twitter stream.

This is the definition of a fulfilling life these days. Sigh.

*Dons cardigan, lights pipe and leaves*

The beauty of Tweetdeck is that you can reply/receive replies to people you’re not following, even if they’re following you… which makes it easy to not follow everyone.

I think it’s going to be another one of those “Web 2.0″ apps that- once people realise 95% of it is full of boring useless junk- the appeal will diminish massively as people start questining

I’m interested in Dave Marchant’s comment; why not just use a decent RSS app ? That way, you don’t need to open an account anywhere, and the feeds will be just as fast.

As far as I’m concerned, Web 2.0 follows on neatly from various reality TV shows that have sprung up over the past 10-15 years; it’s all about 1.5 billion people hoping desperately to be “the next big thing” for 10 seconds. Except that- unlike TV- you can just sit in front of your PC and assume that the other 1.499999 billion internet users MUST be interested in what you have to say. (There may be a strong cynical streak running through me).

Following 50 twitterers wouldn’t be enough for me because I tend to use Twitter to catch up with events in real time and get views of others on things. I currently follow about 300 but even that probably isn’t enough for my purposes so I will keep carefully selecting people to follow and adding them until I get to the point where I am getting enough tweets!