> If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective.
I am convinced, completely convinced, that the idea that you have to read every tweet in your timeline is why so many people don't get Twitter. Even constraining yourself like you describe seems just so silly. I follow 300 people, some of whom (manually) tweet A hundred times a day. I don't read all of them. I dip in and out as I have a few minutes of downtime.
It's a distributed sort of vaguely topical bar chatter. Trying to follow the whole thing is insane, and you have lists if you want to curate particular people.
It's only insane when you follow a huge amount of people and/or people who tweet a lot (or worse, both).
I'll make exception for a handful of companies/organizations (e.g. WSJ, NASA) but generally I won't follow accounts that tweet more than once or twice a day.
I may have misunderstood you. I thought by "whole thing" you were referring to everything that shows up in your timeline, but seems you probably were referring to all of Twitter.
Like I said, I follow 300 people. But I don't break my ass to read everything by everyone. I dip in and out, because anything interesting is going to pop back up eventually and having that broad a cross-section of people to follow exposes me to more and more interesting people.
I am convinced, completely convinced, that the idea that you have to read every tweet in your timeline is why so many people don't get Twitter. Even constraining yourself like you describe seems just so silly. I follow 300 people, some of whom (manually) tweet A hundred times a day. I don't read all of them. I dip in and out as I have a few minutes of downtime.
It's a distributed sort of vaguely topical bar chatter. Trying to follow the whole thing is insane, and you have lists if you want to curate particular people.