It's amazing to me that I see so many people on Twitter who are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts. I imagine they are a small percentage of users on twitter, but one of the most likely to randomly follow every person they can find - much like Googlebot ;-)

You will also see a lot of people who create a Twitter account simply to try to make money or drive business to themselves. You'll also find established businesses who use Twitter as a way to keep up with customer feedback.

I like to think that I'm none of the above. In fact, with the exception of the last one (thank you @fordcustservice !) I find most of those people unworthy of following. I do follow a few SEO specialists, but just the few that when I check their stream it's obvious that they have real content to share and not just regurgitated buzzwords.

My Twitter fetish initially started because a friend of mine was on Twitter so I wanted to check it out. Lucky for me I jumped in right as Twitter was having huge growth pains, so I didn't do much with it for a while. It didn't take long before I found myself followed by Guy Kawasaki, and then things got interesting. It was only another month or so before I unfollowed Mr. Kawasaki because I couldn't handle his self-interested spam. That's what's great about Twitter - you only get the level of spam you're willing to tolerate, because YOU choose what comes into your stream.

For me Twitter has become a way of reaching out to people with similar interests - for instance other executives in healthcare or technology and those interested in Linux and open-source software. I went through a phase where I twitter'd the minutia of daily life only to realize it was boring me almost as much as I'm sure it bored people out there. I still post what I consider interesting tidbits, or the occasional name of whatever movie I'm sitting down to watch, but for the most part my twitter posts have become a conversation with others or little tidbits of information that I think others will find interesting. I also added my blog RSS feed using TwitterFeed so that my blog posts will appear, and in conjunction it's made me create titles for my blog posts that are short and describe adequately what it is I'm writing about so I don't bother others with links that they really don't need to follow.

So, you could say I'm using Twitter now the way I believe the creators intended - to share interesting information and carry on public conversations with people online and through mobile devices.

How are YOU using Twitter?

My twitter page is http://www.twitter.com/tonymaro