I used to think blogging and twittering was about getting ideas out there, but I’m finding it much more valuable to ask questions and invite dialogue. Hearing other people’s thoughts makes me smarter.

And I guess i’m way behind in my knowledge of the twitter universe. I didn’t know there were twitter stats and automatic response thingys. I better get on it! : )

I love SocialToo as well. I use it to determine who is using the “Pump and Dump”. I believe Singley coined that term

And, as most people who follow or have followed me know, I don’t have an issue with @replies. Especially with no IM’ing feature in the Twitter world, I have found that a conversation between multiple people cannot take place via DM. Besides, I use Tweetdeck, so I have zero issues with noisy people. I can either place them in a column for “noisy” people, or I can place the “@” in a filter for each column and never see any @replies. Anyone that @replies to me shows up in my replies column and I can respond to them there. Works well.

I have similar tastes to who I follow as well. If someone follows me, I love to respond in kind. But, I draw the line at sales, marketing and self-help people.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29894062/wid/11915829?GT1=40006

I use TweetLater – though it doesn’t fill me in on who quits following, and why. I have it set to auto-follow anyone who follows me, and then unfollow if they unfollow. I get the keyword report a couple of times a day and frequently follow people who are using words like “worship pastor”, “worship confessional”, “Worship leader”, etc …. but in tweetdeck my attention stays on the “Friends” Group … and I put people in that group that I know, or who engage with me directly.

TweetLater also sends me emails when I get @reply so I can try to stay in the loop on those.

I think what I like most about it is the tags/trends, which make it really easy to follow people who chat about the same stuff, but am surprised that a lot of people don’t engage in the debate. I guess I can be just as guilty as not replying though!

An interesting aside, the UK government are thinking of making lessons in blogging and Twitter etc compulsory for kids at school:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7962912.stm. I guess that’s a sign of the times!

Engaging conversation is fine, but as Luke said, clogging up my feed with your chat room is pretty annoying.

I try and give a mix, about half my tweets are informative, providing links, ideas, etc.

The other half I update with very real life things like “eating lunch at chipotle” or something.

This is probably because my facebook and twitter are linked, and WAY more people follow me on facebook than twitter. If I unlink them, I will probably give up on Twitter.

Last week I unfollowed around 300 people, they were just in it to promote services and would not bring anything interesting to me. I will keep unfollowing these on a regular basis, since I have automatic follow set up for anyone who follows me since it’s hard to keep track.

On that note I also follow like 200 or more people that don’t follow me, like @rainnwilson just because his tweets are fun.

Maybe I should add #8 to the list. “Do not follow everyone’s @replies”. They are a waste of time.