I'm a very casual Twitter user, but I have a question for the power users who are following thousands of people (Vincent, for example, is following close to 5,000 people).
Is that level of information even remotely manageable? How much of their feeds do you actually read, and how much of that is meaningful in any way (most likely lacking any context?)
And IF you're not really reading their feeds... is there any benefit to following them, other than the initial prompt for them to follow you back?
Vast majority of those following more than 500 people would be using a client that enables them to group and separate their stream so they can ignore the bulk of them. Sole reason for following them would be to hope they reciprocate with a follow, but not ignore you.
I use the Pluggio streams feature (which is basically the twitter lists feature re-skinned). It lets me curate really interesting people into groups that can be followed more easily.
No need to use Pluggio for that tho, Twitter lists on twitter.com works perfectly well.
Is that level of information even remotely manageable? How much of their feeds do you actually read, and how much of that is meaningful in any way (most likely lacking any context?)
And IF you're not really reading their feeds... is there any benefit to following them, other than the initial prompt for them to follow you back?