- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.
- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.
- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.
That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately. Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you. BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...
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 also know many people who game their main feed by reciprocally following everyone for audience building, then set up lists for groups they actually care about. This makes the main view too noisy for me, but I could see that as a viable strategy.
You might want to check out a small side-project of mine[1] which I created because I also don't like to follow people who tweet too much. Just put in a username and it'll show you how many times a day (on average) they tweet.
Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.
So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.
(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)
(I'm not on twitter, if that helps frame my question).
On Twitter the guy's profile stated he wrote the library and is working in the same field. Helping me gave him the chance to plug his current work and skill.
Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.
If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.