I joined Twitter on December 24th, 2006 and it has been wonderful to see the service grow. In the beginning I used it mostly via text messages as a way to help keep track of friends while we were travelling together. It was great for helping find out where friends were going out to dinner or to which bar they had settled on for drinks.

Times have changed as I now use the service mostly through search, TweetDeck and by selectively sending my Tweets to Facebook.

I made a poor choice some time ago by following too many people. I used a service automatically following people that followed me. It was like a bad drug soon I was following about a thousand people. Many spammers, ridiculous and not usable.

For the last few days, I’ve spent about 15 minutes daily in the chore of un-following accounts and whittling down the number of people that I follow. I am now down to about 300 and should be complete with this penance soon. My goal when this is done is to increase the quality of the folks I follow and begin only following friends/co-workers, interesting customers (those that are already today and those that I aspire to change) along with a limited number of industry insiders/Press.

I will continue to use Tweetdeck to better organize these people into logical groupings and to keep track of the every growing number of queries I have for our products.

Hopefully it will result in more interesting and higher quality content.

Feature Request: I wish that Twitter had a way to automatically decline a follow to anyone who labels themselves as a Social Media Consultant or Real Estate Expert. These people are the modern day spam and some would say a cancer of twitter.

Photo Credit: Mukulr