I am really fazed and confused by the recent development on Twitter of everyone “auto-following” and sites that help you automatically gain OMG numbers of followers as long as you follow them all back.
Seriously, are you people BORED!?
I tweet, of course — you can click on the “T” icon on the upper right to see my stream and/or follow me if you like, but I try to hold that which I transmit to the masses to a dull roar, and if I can, keep it to something interesting. I’m not about to tell you every time I use a Kleenex because, frankly, you probably don’t givashit. And if you do, you’re creeping me out. Shoo.
I use TwitterFox for watching my own stream of followees, but I keep it trimmed down to a short, scrubby brush. If you follow me and I don’t follow you back, or only do so for a little while, it means you’re not interesting enough to bother with. Don’t take it personally, but I have enough updates to watch without hearing about how incredibly sore the third pimple on your left buttcheek is. It’s not that I don’t care — I just…don’t care.
The other part is this: I have a limited number of CPU cycles in my brain that can do something during the day, and most of those are already taken up by work, family, Facebook, personal projects, and daydreaming about a very frightened and bikinied Julia Stiles. Twitter has to slip itself in there somewhere, and if it’s inserting junk, that’s just going to gum up my gears. Not a pretty sight.
That being said, there’s a good deal of Tweeps that add and enhance my life. Here’s a brief list of those folks I follow who are truly amusing and/or informative. You might find them likewise, or they might strike you as a step above goring your own liver out with a swizzle stick. Different strokes.
- McCainBlogette – Meghan McCain, someone I’ll go into more later, but a fun-sounding gal, despite the political affiliation
- Slashdot – Keeps me from having to read the webpage just to find the few stories I care about
- wootshirt – A shirt a day of some odd incarnation
- thatgirlonline – Caitlin Hill, TheHill88 on YouTube, social youth media at its quirkiness
- planetmoney – NPR’s Planet Money, covering everything financial in real-world terms
- dooce – Mmm….psycho mommy. Heart!
- blurb – Dooce’s husband, an enigma into himself
- DMRegister – The Des Moines Register, Iowa news
- MarsRovers and CassiniSaturn – Because who doesn’t want to know all the sordid details of space probes?
- richardbranson – Mostly self-promoting, but hey…it’s some dude in a wild haircut who is richer than sin. That’s kinda neat.
- BrentSpiner – All the famous characters revealed in the man himself
- levarburton – Butterflies in the sky, they can tweet twice as high
- ComputerGeeks – Great deals on tech stuff from ComputerGeeks (geeks.com)
- wilw – Wil Wheaton’s random timelines of thinking
- BreakingNewz – The AP’s twitter feed for new news stories
- DellOutlet – Deals from Dell on whatever’s on sale that day
- thewino – Kris is inspiring to everyone, except those too dumb to read their way through her awesome writings
There’s more, of course — I’m following 93 people as of this writing — so don’t feel bad if you got left out (feel free to leave a link to yours in the commentary). Or check out my Twitter page to see who I all follow.
So….do you tweet? If so, why? If not, why not? And who do you like the best to follow if you do?



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