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Sorry, I still don't understand. I checked your profile, visited your twitter profile, found out that you're following around 2100 people. How many "tweets" is that per day? Do you really read them all? I feel I'd go insane doing so much "context switches of mind" to read 140-char messages of 2100 different people.

I also tried to see some random samples of the tweets from the people you follow. My impression: most of them have the form:

"@somebody: yeah right" "@somebodyelse: no, I don't" "mumble mumble sil.ly/asdasdew" etc.

I know, such "substantial" messages are not only twitter-specific. I believe you that you enjoy the whole experience. I just don't understand what's in there for me, from the people like you who like it I get the impression that I'm missing something and it frustrates me still that I can't "get" what that is. Thanks.



Do you really read them all?

Ha! No. Not even remotely. Neither do I read every HN comment or every HN post.

I don't drink the river. I dip in a cup occasionally.

I do read anything that's directed at me as an individual.

I have a couple of twitter lists that friends are on that I pay a little bit more attention to (twitter lists are ways of grouping people in twitter - think Google Circles with an even worse UX ;-).

I have a computationally generated twitter list of folk I've 'talked' to recently (via http://conversationlist.com/).

I have a couple of topic-specific lists I glance a weather eye over every day or so to see if anything interesting pops up.

Otherwise it's just serendipitous access when I feel the need for brain popcorn.

For example earlier this evening I came across http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Br... via a retweet from somebody I follow. Which interested me.

If I go look now at 23:42..... and by 23:43 I'm reading about Papa Mau - robot that holds the world record for distance traveled by an autonomous vehicle on land or in the sea http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681003/this-surfboard-sized-robo... via this tweet https://twitter.com/DanAsadorian/status/276360715865038849 retweeted by somebody I follow.

I do not sit on twitter 24/7 reading every tweet that rolls past. That way lies madness (for the way I use twitter anyway ;-)




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