political or technical argument, gossip, scientific info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, repartee, scholarly references, bantering with friends. And I'm in control of deciding how much of each flavor I want in my flow. I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them. There is no social obligation to follow people simply because they follow me. I tell them that I follow people who inform or amuse me, and I hope to do the same for people who follow me.
Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
Searchability
successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding. And by successful, I mean that I gain value - useful information, answers to questions, new friends and colleagues - and that the people who follow me gain value in the form of entertainment, useful information, and some kind of ongoing relationship with me.
If it isn't fun, it won't be useful.
Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams

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Twitter Facts: First state of the Twitosphere in Canada

Twitter in Canada

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Tools for Analyzing Twitter

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The Truth About Twitter « Social Enterprise Blog

Finally, an accurate and informed analysis!

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Twitter has become what’s its users wanted, not what it’s designers intended.
micro-sharing across personalized networks.
I keep up with some.
What makes all of this workable are the user conventions. @ lets me send messages to specific individuals so I’m not just broadcasting posts, but responding to other people’s posts, sharing my ideas, and actually connecting. # enables me to assign a tag to a post so it can be more easily grouped and found by others, in some cases enabling something like real-time chat or asynchronous message board uses. RT provides a mechanism for sharing great posts and information across networks. And of course, the use of URL shorteners enable Twitter to be the stem sentence of a much longer, more in-depth piece of content.
This is the central value of Twitter — it’s basically a giant link exchange that is mediated by human expertise.
Human-recommended content that is shared en masse in real time is something new. Human-recommended content that is shared en masse in real time across personalized networks is something revolutionary and game-changing.
Twitter’s demographic is the mid-career professionals who use the technology to extend professional networks, share expertise, and otherwise increase the scope and breath of the resources they can draw on to be successful.
It takes time, patience, and active cultivation to create your own personalized network.
Today we laugh at people who couldn’t see the value of a telephone or underdstand it’s uses. I wonder how history will regard those who couldn’t see value in Twitter or the fundamental shift in communication and sharing that it represents. I won’t be shocked when folks take me to task for comparing the two, but I’m prepared for that if for no other reason that I’m pretty sure I’m right. For those of you who continue to wonder about Twitter and it’s value, I hope this has helped. For those of you who continue to be derisive for want of effort or intellect, I hope history judges you accordingly. Now, as you might expect, I will be tweeting about this post.