Bob,
If you ever suss out any ROI, I'll join you. Or friend you. Or whatever the heck you do there.
Reading about your experiment is a lot more fun than conducting my own. 
Bemusedly yours,
Kelly
You're starting to get it, Bob.
As for your points:
#1: Totally agree. Even did a post on it a couple months back: http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.co...py-
tweeple.html
No idea why everyone's so nice, but it's refreshing
#2: Yes. Have been suggesting this since day 1- a hide function would also be great when I have two friends at the same conference/party and they're broadcasting in stereo or when someone's stuck in an airport and bored and tweeting to keep themselves occupied
#4: You're not supposed to read every tweet. It's the whole "ambient intimacy" theory- if I'm looking at it when you've just tweeted something, over time I get a better sense of what you're up to and it fills in the gaps. I do read some friends more than others because I know/like them better
5. There's a lot of self-promotion, but I also have great conversations with real-life friends too- whether it's around a business topic or a basketball game or just joking around-- it does serve both purposes. Using the @ feature to talk to people is very useful and you can get a topic going among your friends about everything from restaurants in Boston to current news stories. When that started happening, Twitter really became fun for me and something I enjoyed doing. Give it time and try responding to something non-work related from someone you actually know.
6. I really like the link forwarding though. Certain people in particular turn you on to things that are worth reading about (Tom Ajello, from Poke, for instance- @meat99 - always finds amazing new tech innovations that I'd never discover on my own.) But there's some trial and error figuring out whose recommendations to trust. But no better/worse than real-life situations where you suss out which of your friends recommends movies/restaurants you really like.
7. Larger businesses do well to listen on Twitter and as a promotional vehicle for contests, discounts, events, etc. Service-oriented businesses- hotels, airlines-- anyone with a rep for bad service- can use Twitter to help improve that rep, IF (and only if) they make a real commitment to backing it up, the way Comcast did with Frank Eliason (@comcastcares)
8. I never got golf either.
For point #2, try Twitter Snooze, http://twittersnooze.com/
I agree with point #5 more and more each day. The thing that keeps me going is that, while most of the messaging is promotional, I can't help but keep up with what some people are doing. I'm talking leaders in specific industries, not what a random person ate for lunch.
Put simply, I'm learning from much the promotional messages, which keeps me coming back.
About #6, TAC, come one! Let's be honest: Who has own ideas these days?
Love your post, No. 4 is hilarious.
Not sure it is more civilized. No one is reading, there is just too much junk out there. I think for 1on1 sales it might be ok, but the rest ....Do you have nothing better to do then to pick up pieces of information that others dropped? How about good old-fashioned research when you need some info?
For filtering: Try friendfeed, you can sign up and then make a 'no-read' group or use tweetdeck to do the same with just twitter.
Twitter didn't make a whole lot of sense for me until a couple of months ago. What changed was that I moved cross country to a new place where I had zero connections. I started using Twitter to connect to locals. Since I registered my account over a year ago (and promptly shelved it), there have been a lot of tools created to help find people, local and otherwise.
I agree that too much of it is noise, and self-promotional. It's that way even though 95% of the people I follow are locals. Especially your 5th point, regarding who the heavy tweeters are.
I haven't approached Twitter from the angle of making a profit from it, but from truly keeping it social. That has paid off in spades for me. I'll even admit that it has (extremely indirectly) resulted in some work.
I have been on Twitter for a year. I chose Twitter because I don't like Facebook and Linked-in was too dull. It was my belief that social media is something you need to experience first hand to really understand. I agree with pretty much everything you said. There are many things about Twitter I like. For example, when I am alone at one of my son's weekend long swim meets waiting an hour between events there is always someone interesting for me to talk to on Twitter. Our blog traffic is more than double, I have made new acquaintances around the world and our clients like it that I am practicing what is being preached and I can tell them they aren't missing anything big and I'll let them know when they are. You are right people are generally very civil. I did this as an experiment and consider my experiment largely over but am still tweeting anyway. For a rapidly aging pr guy this has convinced me my skills are still more relevant than ever. Thanks for following me by the way.
Sure guys, I twitter too. Just for fun. And to see what is happening. I believe some of the success stories, but if you take a closer look, no one is talking about a ROI. I think for some nonprofits it might be great, for following just a couple of people and some unknown people for a certain time. It is less intrusive then a mail or a chat, and a nice way to get a contact - but this is close to 1 to 1 (how many intense contacts can you handle in your time) and this 1 to 1 means, there is very limited use in the marketing space for it. Sales in high margin areas might be different. Short term contact might be different. On the other hand, I just have a couple of posts from may be 10 people I follow actively sometimes, and there is so much noise, that I don't add anyone any more.
There are a couple of ways to hide people. The harsh way is to simply unfollow them -- or even block them -- if they get too tedious.
The other is to promote the people you like best by using a desktop client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. You can filter your whole set of users into groups so you can more easily scan the top-quality folks and ignore the rest, or check in with them less often. I find this works especially well to help me see people I like but don't tweet very often; keeps them from getting lost in the shuffle.
Re: #3
1. Many people register and don't use the service. (That doesn't really make them "users" does it?)
2. 1% of those that register account for 35% of "visits" not "tweets."
3. ...which actually means that about 15% of real users account for 35% of visits.
Well I started following you there because I thought you were interesting. I think I use Twitter as a kind of newsfeed of both events and ideas. I follow people who say things I find interesting or clever. I'm not really selling anything, though as I am a writer (and blogger) I suppose it's all about exposure - after all, what the hell are we doing here instead of making a model train set - and I did indirectly get a commission for the Guardian out of it. Networking! But, in my case, fun networking. All the lame marketing and selling is just the MOST tedious. And I like your blog, too.
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