Since I marked my first 100 Twitter followers with this post back on July 4, 2009, I thought I’d mark my second hundred followers with this post. It took 13 months to reach 100 Twitter followers and just over five months to pass the 200 mark on December 7, 2009.
As was the case in my earlier post, I still only follow a relatively small, but terrific, group of people (currently 64). When I follow someone new, I try to cull another. All with the view to reading (or at least scanning) most every tweet they make.
Twitter has changed the way I use the Internet. These exceptional 60+ sources feed me almost all of my daily tech news. I rarely surf from blog to blog the way I used to. I have also abandoned RSS feeds altogether. Twitter-sourced news is superior.
I have also abandoned Friendfeed. Despite some strong lobbying by Davis Freeberg, I just didn’t see the point. Everyone is on Twitter. And, since Facebook purchased Friendfeed back in August, its future is uncertain.
It took me some 1700 Tweets to reach 200 followers. I have to laugh at all my new spamy followers who have 60,000 followers and are following 61,000 people – yet they have only tweeted 3 times. Fortunately these spam-bot jokers are continually culled by Twitter. I used to actively block them when they followed me, but with the constant Twitter purges, I don’t bother any more. They rarely last a week.
With the many ways of searching Twitter these days, I have abandoned the use of hash tags. They seem irrelevant now.
My primary Twitter apps are Tweetie 2 and twhirl on the desktop.
I very much dislike the new Retweet feature. My preference would be for Twitter apps to have both the old and the new Retweet functions, but that seems unlikely. It appears we are stuck with it.
Otherwise, everything I wrote in my July 4 post still applies today.
