Twitter.  There’s a lot of conversations going on, but who’s good to listen to, and who’s not?  This is a common question I get when talking to others about the benefits of twitter.  Who the heck is Robert Scoble, and why should I listen to him?  Seth Go-who-din?

Agreed.  There ARE a lot of conversations out there and it IS often difficult to pick out the good ones from the well, let’s just say, less than interesting ones.  One of the best ways to get started is by following the ‘biggies’.  A quick google search of top 10 twitter folks brought up a number of names that I’ve already heard of, regularly read, and/or know at least something about.  I like to think of these folks as the movers and shakers of twitter.  They’re really driving and having great conversations – all out in the open for you and you and you and me to read.  My recommended top 10 twitterers are:

  1. TechCruch
  2. Scobelizer
  3. Jason Calacanis
  4. Guy Kawasaki
  5. Ryan Carson
  6. 1938Media
  7. Kevin Rose
  8. Leah Culver
  9. Gary Vee
  10. Ijustine
  11. MountainDan
  12. DataDirt

Ok, a bit of self promotion, but it’s my corner, and I’ll promote if I want to.

So we’re off to a good start by following some seriously good tweeple.  What I did when starting off with twitter is to watch conversations, specifically the @ conversations.  In twitter, an @ signifies a response to someone else, whether they’ve asked a question, posted something, etc.  By watching these top 10 folks and their responses to other tweets, you can being forming a base of people that have similar interests.  In my case: Tech, Marketing, Social Media, blog owners, etc.

Tools

A handy tool in who to follow selection comes via TweetDeck.  TweetDeck is hands down the best Twitter client I’ve ever used.  I thought Twhirl was pretty good, but lacked instant search and investigate features.  TweetDeck allows me to instantly view someone else’s profile in a new window with a simple click.  Sure, I could theoretically do this in a browser, but TweetDeck gives it to me all in one easy to manage window.  This way, I can keep on top of current tweets in action, while checking out someone’s profile, and if I want to follow them.

Directories

Eric Eldon (@eldon) from Venture Beat recently reported on some very interesting new search and social abilities via twitter.  He points out that while twitter is great for keeping the world up to date on what you’re up to, there’s a severe lack of social context to fuel further expansion of your personal network.  He recommends giving MrTweet a try.

The way it works is that you follow Mr. Tweet’s company Twitter account (@MrTweet), and it sends a link to a personalized report that it has generated for you. The report shows you meta-data about other users, like how often they post Twitter messages (called “tweets”), how likely they are to follow people who follow them, and more. In one part of the site, you can see rankings showing who “influential” Twitters are, partially based on whether they’re tweeting about the same topics as you, and also if they have a lot of followers.

Eric points out that the system does have some flaws including Mr.Tweet suggesting someone he’s already following and fails to find interesting people who aren’t already following him, and aren’t necessarily popular.  Twubble is a similar service that tries to automatically matchmake based on similarities, but again…no way to import your current twitter list in order to avoid duplication.

Twitter focused blog Twitterrati does provide some help in pointing us to some directories which help you sort tweeple by common interests.

Twellow is a twitter search service that allows you to search people by category, such as “Car buff” or “Xbox gamer”.  A similar service is offered by JustTweetIt.

In summation, twitter is a great tool that allows you to connect, broadcast to, and stay in touch with friends that you already know, and friends you’re about to meet.  Bringing it altogether in one cohesive “hey I know that guy, didn’t know he was on twitter” motion is/will be the holy grail.

Did I mention Facebook’s Connect? Until next time…..

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