Tweet Easy
I know lots of people who still haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. When I ask my friends why they aren't on Twitter (or more commonly, why they have an account but never use it) I usually get a response that is something along the lines of "I just don't get it" or "It's just a bunch of status updates."That response is understandable. I mean, the first time I signed on and followed my favorite actors, athletes, and designers I was completely overwhelmed by the flood of RTs, #hashtags, and DMs. It actually made me a little bit nervous, and I wasn't sure I liked this fast-paced form of social interaction. Eventually I figured it out, and regardless of how often I actually tweet I really enjoy scrolling through my timeline to get my daily fix of interesting articles and copious amounts of oversharing.
If you still find the Twitterverse to be a little mind-boggling, I suggest you visit an awesome site that was created by Jessica Hische. She is a fantastic illustrator with some web design chops, and she wrote an article explaining the basics of Twitter. It's both hilarious and helpful, and I wish it had existed when I first signed up.
Check out the site here: http://momthisishowtwitterworks.com/
And you can check out her other work here: http://jessicahische.com/
I find Twitter to be a valuable source of photographic news and information. Those associated with the photography industry in some fashion are pretty active on Twitter. Sometimes a short title of a blog or article is enough to know if I want to read the blog or article or not.
It does help to be careful about who you follow. Some celebs take pleasure in spouting inanities, and I really don't have the patience for all that. So most of my follows are "friends in real life", prominent photographers, and some people from part of my target demographic. By being selective about following, it's easy to avoid being overwhelmed.
Lists also help. You can create lists of users without having to follow them. That way, you can check the list, without having all those tweets show up in your own "friends" stream.
Yeah lists are my new favorite. I haven't gotten done classifying all the people I follow, but I have one just for Designers that I check most often.
There are always a few people that tweet entirely too much, but I follow them because they can be good sources of info. Lists help me keep those people around, just in case.
Matt - I really enjoy the word "inanities", and I'm pretty sure I'm going to make a Twitter List with that exact title...