Yesterday I did an @-reply to Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer):
@Scobleizer, for me twitter is for getting interesting insights and ideas. I’m sure not going to get them from those who follow me! (ducks)
Robert had tweeted his blog post on a change of follow habits, You are SO unfollowed! in which he said:
On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back.
Twitter is such a useful ecosystem for ideas and news, why would you want to limit it to only those who want to listen to what you say?
I follow people I find interesting. Some of them follow me, some don’t. Either way, it’s ok. If @gruber, @mkapor or @timoreilly were to follow me, I’d be flattered. But it certainly doesn’t bother me if they don’t. I actually prefer to presume that most of the folks who follow me do so because they find me interesting.
Some of those 7,000 who un-followed @Scobleizer were bots or other sorts of spamming machines. That’s another reason to just follow twitter accounts that you find valuable – my direct messages in twitter don’t suck since everyone I follow is interesting to me. Scoble’s original post does a nice job of enumerating the reasons his change of habit has improved his Twitter experience.
I do wonder what’s next for Twitter. It’s useful and fun, but it’s also still changing and growing. Clients and tools like Seesmic Desktop, CoTweet, and FriendFeed are all changing the way we use Twitter. What’s next, I don’t know. But I’m enjoying the conversation.