Microblogging - a quick review

First of all, I would like to mention that my estimation of microblogging revolves around my experiences with Twitter. Many people have written about what they use Twitter for, so I think the time has come that I contribute my own 2 ct. worth.

I think it was June 2007 when I started trying this out - announcing new blog posts, some events and interesting material I was reading -, but already one month later I only contributed tweets very infrequently. Maybe it was because of lack of feedback or interesting twitters to follow, I am not really sure.

Well, at the beginning of this year I started again, and I realized that it can be beneficial to review the list of people to follow. In that context, I found the following classes of utterances (roughly corresponding to classes of users):

1. tweets describing what people are doing (going to lunch, preparing a meeting, spending time with their kids etc.)
   
2. tweets referencing interesting articles to read
   
3. tweets embedded in bilateral conversations about various issues
   
4. news tweets from specific aggregators
   

Of course there are other utterances not fitting in any of these "classes", but what I can say for now is that while I am interested in (2) and (4), (1) is noise to me, and (3) is hard to follow if I am not involved.

As far as my own tweets are concerned, these focus around thoughts regarding newly discovered tools or contributions just read, or references to interesting articles.

As the nature of twitter is unidirectional utterances rather than real conversations, I sometimes feel a bit lost when I do not receive any feedback from what I contributed, but maybe this is because I do not follow enough interesting users.