…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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