Twitter Thoughts After A Few Days Usage

Everton, I use Twitter for my business, Driving Instructor, and find it is helpful as I can Tweet on little changes and things to keep pupils, both current and potential, updated.

But I agree with you that there are far more powerful things that can be done and look forward to reading more info from you on how you get on using Twitter

Yes - those tend to be the most useful people. Although I'm getting a little tired of people linking to people who link to people who write about social media. It's interesting, but not that interesting, guys.

It can be hard, at first, to sort through the wheat and the chaff but the pattern I've settled into for my personal account is to search about for various people with related interests, (I use www.tweetlater.com for keyword alerts), follow them all, and then once my stream is a mass of stuff I can hone it down by unfollowing the people with really poor signal-to-noise ratios.
3 or 4 passes of this exercise will (usually) render you a really interesting stream full of relevant content.
Many people I know take the usual (and in my opinion slightly dull), approach of only following / being followed by 'people they actually know'. Personally I cut those people out of my feed as they can be dealt with on Facebook, and are less likely to pump interesting content on to twitter.

I have started deleting people who post useless links. The people I'm most impressed with so far are Darren Rowse and Steve Rubel. They are both huge bloggers, but rather than using twitter to promote their own material they are pointing out interesting links they've spotted that they haven't blogged about.

@ Everton - I too 'use' twitter as a tool to get a bit extra exposure and hopefully visitors to my mian site via my blog site. I use a plugin that sends a shortened blog post directly to my twitter feed automatically - and it really wors well. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Michael Jackson concert and got about 400 views from google, but over 1000 views from twitter as my tweet got picked up on twiturls and featured as popular. So it can work for that kind of thing, but it isn't really suitable as a means for 2-way communications.

I've used TweeTree which makes it a bit easier to see whole Tweet threads but by and large, Twitter is frustrating to attempt to have any long or meaningful conversations with others. And with following just over 230 others, I'm all too aware of how difficult it is to try to keep up with everyone's posts.

I've about decided that by its very nature, Twitter is mostly a spam platform.  Oh, you can yuck it up & chit-chat with some people, but most of the hardcore "pro" Twitterers are only there to use it as another means to plug their blogs, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, or some other social network - or to promote their services.

And I've done my fair share of promoting new posts on my blog on Twitter - and there has (thankfully!) been a small uptick in site traffic as a result - but I'm not sure that the meager return merits the time I've put into it.

And just as with so many of the blogs you'll come across, the Tweeterverse is rife with metaTweeting - Tweeting about Tweeting and often those posts don't really offer any value or enjoyment.

The single most productive thing I've done on Twitter has been to discover a couple of dozen other users in my own geographical region, many of whom have their blogs listed in their profiles so I've been able to expand the list of area bloggers that I keep on my site.

I agree about twitter not being a useful communication channel.  I'm still 'using' it for now as I want to see if it can actually drive users to my sites.

Tweetdeck is great, and I'm also trying out "AlertThingy". It seems to be working very well, too.

For the sorting issue I use TweetDeck ... not sure if other tweeter clients do the same, but TweetDeck lets me create groups of people and displays their tweets on a separate column ... so I got the column with people I really want to see what they're talking about ... I got the group for domainers so all their messages are in a single column ... and then I have the column where all the tweets are displayed.

Granted, when you follow thousands of people this doesn't work well ... but for a few hundred it can help.