The problem with Twitter is you truly can’t engage in many conversations during the day unless your a SMORE and have nothing better to do with your time. So the need to create verticals or categorize tweets will become important. Of course, as these platforms evolve, Twitter, Pownce, Yammer, etc. we are setting ourselves up for another aggregation scenario like is starting to emerge around social networks.

I think the cognitive capacity to keep up on Twitter is 10x worse than social networks.

Just thoughts….

@Alan some people are treating Twitter like a sandbox and then there are the people that realize the value of Twitter and then there are the people that don’t know how to use it at all and who are creating the rules as they are going- your way is the most rewarding

the value of a tweet can be observed in a variety of different ways but mostly by the the value of *your* time …
1) besides the obvious the tweet is limits to 140 ASCII characters (generally) – which carriers charge $800-1200/MB (SMS/Text messaging!)
2) depending on how you tweet (the method of posting) there are further distinctions such as is the value worth “re-entering” the same information the same way (?)
3) value which corresponds to re-entering such that a third person – (which could be broken down into those you pay attention to & those you don’t – say by responding to that “follower” by some measure) – could not tell the difference between the two “tweets”
4) value according to re-entering the tweet such that the entry is not the same according to the same hypothetical third person
5) not enough value to re-enter …
6) value in “re-tweeting” a previously entered tweet (in lieu of entering yet again)

we can then say that if there is any alleged tail, how often do you search tweets? archive them? scan for certain types of tweets (by person, term, some other context such as “hashtag”?)

finally, the value is tied to a willingness to pay for the service itself … the community that is “twitter” like any network is a value based on the interactions of the members … as for the network or enterprise value, we may know that sooner rather than later if twitter is bought

willingness to pay, especially if it concerns *your* time, matters more than marketing (unless they pay you for that time) – at least that is my 2 cents (and I’m not sure if it could be reduced to a size or readability to be a tweet!)

Thanks for the shout-out.

I am in complete agreement with you about following large numbers of people on Twitter. I only follow people I actually know or people with whom I’ve built up an online relationship to the point where I may as well know them in real life. Why? Because I could care less what some random stranger ate for breakfast or what link they think is interesting.

Even worse are those who fish for followers. As I posted on my own blog today, when I see these desperate tweets of “I only need 25 more followers to hit 1,000″ all I can think is “wow, someone had a rough time of it in high school.” But seriously, as with most things, quality always is better than quantity.

As Twitter evolves, the current “whores” will have less and less influence as their interests (generally tech and self-promotion) no longer jibe with the interests of most users.

Cheers,

Alan