Twitter: Dysfunctional Chatroom or River of Ideas?

Over the past week I’ve unsubscribed from hundreds of blogs to make my life a little more manageable. Between two Google Reader accounts I followed nearly 500 feeds. The signal to noise ratio was too low so I cut back to 65 feeds on each reader (a somewhat arbitrary number but seems to work well for me). Since then, I’m able to finish my blog reading in a much shorter period of time and I feel I’m not missing anything important.

But I noticed something interesting as I followed more people on Twitter: I got more out of the time I spend reading it. I also find a ton more interesting blog posts from places I don’t know about. So far this week I’ve added nearly 100 new people to my personal Twitter feed and I hope to add about as many more by this weekend. The best source of new people to follow comes from people I have followed in the past; I just look at who they are following.

While some might find Twitter a dysfunctional chatroom and a waste of time, I’m finding it a river of ideas.