I got back and forth on Twitter– sometimes I think there’s a ton of value to it, sometimes I think it’s a complete and total waste.  It is, of course, only as good as the people you’re following, or the content you’re adding.  I’ve felt like a less-than-adequate content producer of late, so that part of the equation isn’t up to snuff.  And I don’t follow a huge number of people– a poet friend-of-a-friend that I respect a great deal, my boss and a handful of co-workers, Smalls and Ayse, a couple improv peeps, and the biggest twit on Twitter, my great friend Lee Creighton.

Some days, my sidebar is full of tweets from just one or two people, and I feel like there’s not much to it– some political linky-linky (important, yes, but not what I use Twitter for), a bunch of @soandso tweets that say good morning or discuss coffee, a little bit of technical discussion (I follow a kickass coder).  None of it makes my life richer.  But you do get things like:

• This morning a friend posted that there was a new traffic pattern at one of the best places to hang out in Carrboro.  This isn’t earth-shattering news, and I am quite sure I would have noticed when I tried to turn in the out lane.  But still, it’s cool to know those things as they happen.
• Found out that an author I have a great deal of respect for is speaking in the Triangle soon, and since I don’t regularly read the Independent, I would not have known that otherwise.  (Alas, I’m spoken for that evening.)
• @arsepoetica tweets about the music she’s listening to, and when she talks about a band I don’t know, I make a point to check them out, because we like a lot of the same stuff.
• A couple of times, I have looked at a recent tweet by Lee and thought, “OK, he’s available for hijinks.”  And then we hijink.

I’ve thought frequently that I would be more interested in following poets; fiction writers would be good too, but poets would be my top targets.  The compact nature of tweets could/should produce some interesting results among a group of like-minded, twittering poets, one that I would be very keen to watch even if I wasn’t an active participant.  But I cannot find that group, if they exist; I can’t find more than one working poet twittering right now (and she tweets about her day job).

So how to make Twitter more useful, if the people I most want to follow aren’t on it?  As it turns out, it may be following more people.  I have been very selective thusfar about who I would follow because I was trying to keep up with everything that people close to me post.  But that actually might not be what serves me– I might do better to follow a bunch of people, and if I miss tweets, I miss tweets.  If I miss tweets aimed at me, so be it.  Because if someone wants/needs to talk to me directly, they know how to find me via more reliable means that Twitter.

Following more people seems like it would create a sort of conversation slipstream– the real world happens, and the conversation on Twitter is the backwash.  So one could reasonably step in and out of that at will; it would be the nerd equivalent of the evil movie character who goes to his room with 100 TVs on 100 different channels and simply sits and absorbs all the information.

Now I just have to find interesting people to follow.  I suppose the problem is still the same… but where, in the past, I would only follow someone I knew in real life (or, at least, had some level of private communication with), I’m going to follow some people who just strike me as interesting.  I added one earlier today, who saw my tweet about wanting to follow more poets and writers, and direct messaged me about it– we have a similar desire to see it happen.  (She’s also a proponent of 140-character microfic, or, as I’m calling it now, “tweetfic.”)

Perhaps I’ll be more interesting as a result.