I have this one rule, you see.
1) I will Follow someone for a time, long enough to see if they have any intention to Follow me back. If not, I Unfollow their sorry egotistical ass.*
The only exception to this rule (well, 8 exceptions, really) are The Pope, IAM_SHAKESPERE, and some gunny sites that are mostly concerned with pushing product.
*If they don’t Follow me back, and I still want to occasionally ‘read’ them, and they are Right-Conservative, I put ‘em in my ‘Right-Conservatives Who Are Also Elitists Who Don’t Follow Back’ list. There’s some names you’ll recognize on that list.
The secret to managing Twitter is learning the proper use of lists. If you have lots of followers and are following many people back, as you should, your ‘timeline’ gets pretty crowded. And some people tweet too damned much. The secret is to devise 'lists', populate these lists with people you really want to read, and then select and read from that list. That way you’re not obliged to read tweets from people you follow back; so you’re not swamped by a crowded timeline. Any list can be comprised of anyone, including people you’re not following (another of my lists is "Dirty Socialists"; you can guess who's on that).
(You will show up on other people's lists. If some asswhole puts you on a list that's labeled "Suckers of goat c*ck" or something similar, simply block that twerp. Your name will disappear from the offending list.)
That said, it’s always good manners to check in your timeline on occasion, and try to interact with your followers (especially those who RT one of your tweets, or reply to one of your tweets). Otherwise you might be seen as aloof. Always try to ‘answer’ a tweet sent in your direction, or acknowledge a RT given to one of your tweets; that’s just good manners and is proper Twitter etiquette.
I have the most fun on Twitter in the #hashtags. YMMV.
OH! If some LeftLibProgg twerp blocks you, and you want to keep track of his going-ons (Charles Johnson, the internet's premier asshole for instance, who is in fact a boring and stupidish Twitterer; but on occasion he has a link that's worth checking out), or if someone is *so important* twitter-wise that you want to read all of his or her tweets in your RSS reader so’s not to miss any, well, here’s the secret. Pay attention...Twitter took all the RSS feed click-to-read dealios off of the tweet pages, because they want to keep you in their sandbox (shades of the first iterations of America Online; those clowns made it very difficult for AOL users to leave their site and actually surf the 'net. I emailed the CEO at the time, Steve Case he responded to my complaint, 'you should just get a slip account then. We are a primary destination'. I told him to go f*ck himself, and acquired a slip account). Use this technique to discover any twerp's RSS feed:
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=from:twitter-username
…where “twitter-username’ is the character’s name sans @; for example:
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=from:vermontaigne
will give you the option to read RSS feed for Dan Collins (who has a pretty decent tweetly presence).
Oh, and you’ll want to know who ‘unfollowed’ you, so you can ‘unfollow’ them back. http://who.unfollowed.me/
Also there you can find out who’s not following you back, and give ‘em the boot. Add the saintly presences who won't follow you back to a list, if you deem their Tweets worthy.
But please, don't be a herd animal and just 'follow' someone for the hell of it. You are likely just contributing to a massive ego that doesn't need any more stroking. There's plenty of useful idiots out there who will give 'em that; don't be one of 'em.
And remember:
Cheers!
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