Once I got to the point that I had my follow list well tuned for my tastes, Twitter became a very valuable source of information for me. The trick has been to be ruthless with unfollowing people if they dirty my Twitter stream with stuff that distracts me or irritates me. (It's also helpful to be on the lookout for anyone to add who might add value to the stream.)
This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates?
And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to:
Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers, doesn't mean you should follow them.
When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the following reasons:
* They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.)
* They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to hear it all the time.
* They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely.
Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.)
Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.
It looks like it's already starting to fade. Twitter became popular because of the number of high profile celebrities that could use it to talk to their fans directly. Now it looks like those celebs are all abandoning it...
Who else? Also, I'd argue that celebrities tweeting is not why Twitter became popular. Have you used your RSS reader lately? If it's fading, why did Google add it to search results?
Why yes, yes I have used my RSS reader. I use it quite regularly. Unlike twitters stupid 140 char limit, RSS gives me enough information right in the reader to know if the article in question is worth clicking on to read more (not to mention, most sites let you read the whole article right in the RSS feed).
I've dabbled a bit with twitter, and to me at least it doesn't seem even remotely likely to displace RSS. Now, if I could find more high quality social news sites like HackerNews, MetaFilter, etc. THAT might supplant my RSS reader.
Well, from the article alone it mentions Miley Cyrus & Stephen Fry. I know Summer Glau, Seth MacFarlane, Judd Apatow, Nelly Furtado, Larry David, Denzel Washington and JJ Abrams have all left among probably many others.
The trajectory is exactly like a fad, some popular people do it, everybody does it, it becomes mundane, then popular people leave, everybody leaves, fast forward 10 years and everybody makes fun of it.
So just like Ricky I ended up abandoning it. Maybe it works for really well networked and extrovert people but is not a universal utility by any means.
Personally, I've never been interested in twittering to the world or reading hundreds of tweets a day. I just use it to keep up to date with a few friends.
