“I’m not planning to cash these people in for a prize on my way out the door, so what difference does it make how many people are following me? ”

Well put.

“I’m happy for the Twitter guys as a team, that they built something so useful and so cherished by many, but this Twitter-Frenzy is outlandish, with people running around trying to gain followers that they have no idea what to do with.”

Couldn’t agree more.

My challenge is differentiating between what’s real and what’s hype, and of course, what’s the point. Not my point, or your point perse, but the point of the frenzy and the folks who are all caught up in it. Not sure that I really care about it at all, but it’s so in your face, how do you not at least formulate some commentary. *shrug.

Thanks for stopping by Bill. Love the Cammack/Dating Genius perspective always.

Now that I think about it, the entire way that I initially built my Twitter followers was from already knowing about people from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. By their contributions and conversations over the years, I knew I was following people that I wanted to hear from… mainly because when I saw their names on posts, I would click through and read what they had to say, so I was interested in their real-time thoughts as well.

What happened to my list is that people started following me that I had no point of reference for, but in the “follow the people who follow you” format I had selected, I added them and ended up following ~2,400 people, which clearly makes it impossible to find the signal amongst the noise. I also realized that I wasn’t actually reading the stream, but responding to @replies to me, meaning there was no reason for me to be following so many people that I wasn’t actually reading unless they spoke to me directly.

I dropped my list of people I was following down to ~600 and I’ve been building up slowly as new people add me and I actually take the time to check out their profiles and decide whether I want to listen in to their stream or not. By dropping ~1,800 people, I lost around 200 followers, but so what? I have 2,300 now instead of 2,500. So what? I’m not planning to cash these people in for a prize on my way out the door, so what difference does it make how many people are following me? It’s not giving me more cred as an editor or a videoblogger, so who cares?

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when the smoke clears. I’m happy for the Twitter guys as a team, that they built something so useful and so cherished by many, but this Twitter-Frenzy is outlandish, with people running around trying to gain followers that they have no idea what to do with.

Shhhhhh… Dont’ tell anybody about this blog!!! :O