I'm relatively new to being a twit. My interest in social media and community integration started a while back, but I didn't get into Twitter until much later in the game, but nonetheless, I'm hooked. 
I joined Twitter back in March, after hearing absolutely everyone talk about it at SES New York; I haven't looked back. I can follow some of the people I consider gurus of the industry, and I've gotten a lot of helpful information and tips from just being "out there". However, I'm wondering if other people get real value out of Twitter? My "follower" rate has gone up exponentially since joining, and I'm not in it to get more followers by just adding new people to follow. I want to make sure that I'm getting the most out of the noise, not just have other people.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy getting new followers. What I don't think is useful is to follow a bunch of people to try to get them to follow you back. It's a nice feeling to get someone following you on Twitter, but it almost makes me feel cheap to see that they're following five thousand other people in addition to little ol' me. In an ideal world (hey, I'm on a utopian bend at the moment, please forgive me), people would follow each other for genuine value, but where there's the potential for spam, spammers will always be. It just doesn't seem that these spammers are very intelligent.
Twitter spam has been tweeted about a lot lately; can it even exist? Just this afternoon, Stop Twitter Spam blogged about their theory of so-called spammers shutting down the service. If you read further down, they talk about charging super-users a fee. Sure - if you can have a system which calculates the value of each contribution that a super-user offers. I'm not saying that Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis are perfect or not noisy by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of people would argue that their popularity (even though they follow a massive amount of people) and insight is valuable. What the not-so-smart-so-called-spammers don't realize is that most people don't have auto-follow. Also, if you're following tons of people and are that desperate to get people to follow you back, chances are what you're trying to say isn't worth hearing about.
I'm selective. I want real information, entertainment and rants - not messages about how great you think your web design company is, or how great your weight loss regimen is. So that's why I'm not following you, but following some pretty interesting and funky people. In short, Twitter spam can't really exist as long as you don't feel it necessary to use auto-follow. And feel free to un-follow me if you don't think I'm providing any value to you, whether it be my witty commentary on the guy who orders for his entire office and always manages to get in front of me in the mornings or replying to other twits. I value conversation, and would love to engage in one with you.
Sorry if you thought this was a post about Twitter having $15 million and not using it to upgrade their architecture...
Back to my block list, then.
