Reading from the Twitter Spigot

As the size of my Twitter Village has grown, the volume of traffic has also had a dramatic increase.  There are literally dozens of conversations going on at any one moment.  So how does one leverage the strengths of Twitter while being doused with the minutia that makes up a Twitter stream?

Simple.  By realizing that you can only participate in relevant conversations.  Kind of like walking down a street and hearing random bits of conversations.  You don’t always make sense of everything, and most often, you don’t need to.  It’s really about being able to join in when you want, or when your wanted.  It’s not about “keeping up” at all.

Yes, I tend to skim a bit, maybe one page back at most.  All I’m really looking to do is understand what the current conversations are before jumping in.  Odds are that my contribution may have already been brought to the conversation and I just like to understand where it’s going before committing some random thought.

Having a larger and larger number of Twitter followers, and following a large number isn’t as hard as I had thought it would be.  Moreover, I’m learning a lot more about the community that I’m a part of there.  Over the past year, I’ve met a lot of people, and have gotten perspectives that I otherwise would not have had a chance to learn.

Twitter is one of those tools that you really can get value from.  It doesn’t replace the blog, or special-interest social networks.  Instead it’s an essential tool for the social media explorer’s kit – one that offers much more than it’s simple interface lets on.

What’s your experience as your Twitterverse expands?