Twitter's saturation point Apr24 '08
At one point, I knew each of the people I followed on Twitter intimately. I could recite what they did yesterday, how they felt, and what was going on in their lives. My daily routine was more exciting having a close group of friends whom I "chatted" with on Twitter.
If someone didn't update in a few hours, I wondered where they were, and what they were up to.
This was when I followed 50-100 people.
My rate of following new people has continued on a steady pace, and now I'm following nearly 350. It's becoming too much for me to keep up with.
I refresh the Twitter home page a couple times an hour, during the day. This includes refreshes on the mobile Twitter site on my iPhone. Those that updated 5-10 minutes prior to my refresh, I'll see. Everyone else, however, takes a back seat. It's hard to remain informed by so many people, but at the same time, I want to constantly expand my network of contacts.
For me, Twitter has reached a saturation point. The intimacy of "knowing" a select group of people has become lost, and now I feel I'm just following a bunch of strangers. We're not "connected" like we once were.
RSS
I've resorted to using RSS to follow a select group of individuals that I want to keep an eye on, because there's just no way to "catch" their updates in the general stream of activity on a day/hour/minute basis.
RSS, however, is server delayed. Reading Twitter updates via RSS is like reading yesterday's newspaper. It loses that impulsive, live edge.
Notifications
Perhaps this is precisely why Twitter allows notifications to be sent to SMS or IM. You choose who you want to "monitor," and only those updates get sent to SMS or IM - in real time, as it happens.
In practice, the concept of Twitter notifications is not realistically scalable. If you have notifications set for more than 15 people, you'll quickly become overwhelmed and annoyed by the amount of incoming updates.
An enigma
This leaves Twitter in a state of an enigma - something that could be inherently useful, if there was some way to scale your abilities to maintain intimate exposure to each and every person you follow.
Humans can't scale like server farms. We only have limited capacity to absorb information to form meaningful, intimate relationships.
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Matt, Sounds like you've reached the limits of your Monkeysphere. http://www.cracked.com/article14990what-monkeysphere.html ... Read more.