what are you doing on Twitter?

This is a serious question.  Twitter is a tool to engage with your community, in fact it doesn't make any sense if you don't have a community, as I said in my Web 2.0 history talk.  If your community is in Facebook, mailing lists, MySpace, a Battlestar Galactica fan site or for that matter the local coffeeshop or pub, there's nothing wrong with that.

I can certainly see you might be there just to follow interesting people, but I'm not sure this going to get you more value than following their blogs, since you're going to get quite a bit of noise, due to the nature of the medium.  I would never write a one-line blog post that I'm fighting with the cafeteria vending machine, but I do write tweets like that.

Darren Barefoot has been thinking in particular about the follower count issue, and has an elegant lifehack for those who can't help watching their count - a GreaseMonkey script to remove it from the screen altogether.

He also points to a fantastic thoughtful piece by Dave Gorman - When Twitter Gets Weird...

But I hope Twitter doesn't turn into Myspace with all that 'thanks for the add' nonsense. It's not a competition to collect as many friends as possible. And anyone who follows thousands and thousands of people can't actually be following them can they? So relax. And interact. I mean really interact.

Gorman suggests one way to find out if an account is actually interactive is looking at their @ replies in TweetStats.

I fare ok (I think) - 23%. (Below is barchart of replies on left, and interface used for Twitter on right.)

An account whose identity I won't mention, but it rhymes with Mrime Pinister, has 0% (no @ replies, so "no data").

I got followed by a "social reporting something" account, which was following over 8000, so I immediately blocked it - I have to say in fairness that when doing the TweetStats, it actually turns out to be very interactive (36%) - but I have to wonder if this is a microcommunity within a larger community. That is, you have a dozen or so people you know and @ reply with (and maybe make a Tweetdeck group for) and 8000 other people you "follow" but can't keep up with or interact with in any meaningful way.

To be fair though, the architecture of Twitter rewards (or if you're a corporation, maybe requires) following, since you can't DM someone who doesn't follow you, and they can't DM you back unless you follow them.  (You can however send @ replies to people who don't follow you, and to people you don't follow, and they will show up in their @ replies section or in a search - probably some people don't realise this.)

What I said on Darren's site (forgetting, as usual, to use CoComment) is

I think in part the stats obsession is about status, and in part it’s about extending a tired broadcast model of audience and demographics into the online world. In social networking, what matters is not number of followers, what matters is whether you are engaging with your community. It’s about engagement and influence, not racking up a high score. When I see someone who “follows” more than a couple hundred people on Twitter, I know they can’t possibly be engaging with them in much of a meaningful way. I just got followed by some “social research application” guy who follows over 8000 - to me that’s an immediate signal to click the block button, which I did.

UPDATE: Via FriendFeed I see that Bora had a good post related to this topic last year: PLoS - on Twitter and FriendFeed.

UPDATE 2009-03-29: I should mention that Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, follows 186 people and has 3196 tweets.  (He is followed by a rather epic 279,077 people).  So when it comes to who you follow and how much you tweet, it's about quality, not quantity.