Accidentally on Purpose Blog

A little while back I wrote a post:  What Makes Twitter So Valuable?  Well today, Twitter gave me a present.   I received a notice that someone was now following me.  I always look at their bio’s and recent tweets to get an idea of who they are in order to determine if I should follow back or not.  There was no bio, no blog listed and in fact, pretty much devoid of any way to determine who this person was.

But, one of their tweets did catch my eye:

my new favorite blog http://failblog.wordpress.com/ 11:46 AM February 05, 2008 from web 

I figured this would shed some light on who this person was — it didn’t, and while I still don’t know who it is — they do have a great sense of humor so I followed back.  I also added the failblog to my reader for those times that I need some comic relief.

Thanks @lenvt.

Twitter is one of those things that I CAN see the value in it but, candidly, I’m still having a bit of difficulty extracting that value. You see I’m new to Twitter and while I don’t “tweet” a lot at the moment, I am lurking and learning with the hope and expectation that at some point I’ll be as productive as others — like James Governor for instance.   Last week I was explaining my problem to Susan Getgood and she told me that my problem was normal and that I shouldn’t be discouraged.   You see, Susan believes that the value of Twitter starts to really become apparent once you approach the 120/150 range of following/followers.

Laura Fitton wrote a great post on twitter where she too reaffirmed Susan’s point:

How does Twitter shift from idiotic to amazing? It takes a village - a critical mass of interesting people - to read and write to. When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me. You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.

Everyone connects to a different array of tweets and tweeters, so there aren’t discrete villages per se. But, the degrees of separation and connection create layers around each individual that hint at a very sketchy (and Twitter-specific) “social map.” (Often highly removed from who you actually know).

I know I’m not alone in this — I’ve heard countless times “I tried it but I just didn’t get it” or conversely “its the single greatest social network.”  I You can follow me on twitter here, perhaps someday soon Twitter will be my village too.

I’m really very interested in your thoughts:  What makes Twitter so valuable for you?