Stardust Global Ventures

Since I started using Twitter over three years ago, I’ve stayed pretty focused on keeping the people I follow to a group I actually engage with. I’m very mobile and most of my tweeting is done from my Blackberry. I have long used the SMS interface. This means the more people I follow, the more likely my phone buzzes constantly because of the messages. SocialScope definitely changes that, but I have struggled at times with following people who tweet in high volumes, that I’d like to follow to read some of what they say, but don’t quite know how to deal with the volume of tweets in my stream.

Thanks to Twitter lists and an approach @stoweboyd described, I have an answer. My pal @Phoneboy and I spent the very early days on Twitter talking to each other and he asked me to explain, so this is for you Dameon.

I’m in the process of creating lists of people I don’t follow, but who I often want to read. I’ve even taken to working through my following list, and one by one moving some off to a list like EverybodyReadsThem, then unfollowing. It’s a great place for people like Michael Gartenberg, who I like to read, but don’t have any relationship with. It means I can list someone like BJMendelson who has almost a million followers, and I do engage with now and again, and not necessarily have everything he tweets in my live stream of primary contacts.

It makes lists a prioritization scheme that works. I often use the term signal-to-noise ratio in describing what happens to your Twitter stream when you follow too many people. As humans, we can only really engage with so many people. At some point, our stream gets so noisy we can’t pay as close attention to the people we really want to engage with because the stream is rushing by too quickly. I find for me that following and engaging with about 200 people is easy enough, but if you scale that up to 500, you start losing conversations and missing things you might want to see. That’s my number. Your mileage may vary.

Lists let me still follow the people I’m interested in, but in a different way. And my primary following list can be what I’ve tried to make it all along, the people I truly pay closest attention to. Lists let me organize how I receive the messages from the people I pay attention to in a more granular fashion. That doesn’t lessen the value of anyone on any of my lists. It’s just my personal tool for managing my streams into tiers of activity.

Anyone on any of my lists is indeed someone I follow and pay attention to. I just do it in a way that works for me.