A. I review everyone that follows me — there are a lot of spammers that need to be blocked (and surprisingly some of them are not that obvious any more).

B. I read one or more pages of an individual’s recent tweets to see if what they have to say is of value. When I’m not sure, I follow for a while and watch their flow. If the individual isn’t sharing their thoughts, findings and discoveries, they typically get unfollowed.

C. I’d checked out Tim O’Reilly some time ago — he wasn’t using Twitter like he is now. I didn’t follow him until I read he’d finally ‘figured it out’.

D. Oddly, people you know are not necessarily the people you want to follow on Twitter. It depends on your own use of Twitter. For me, a lot of the people I know aren’t focused on the same deep topics I’m interested in.

E. You may get to know people on Twitter better than people you night work with in person, who often don’t share as much, or engage in deep conversations (depends on your own dynamics in either case).

F. I’ve discovered that Twitter requires an ‘immersive’ experience — no one can tell you about it enough for it to make sense, you have to experience it to find the value, and a single experience is often not enough. A good number of people report that they were either ‘hand held’ through the process, experienced it as a result of a conference, or were so shamed into it by others that they kept at it until it made sense.

G. Twitter is a wealth of information for me. Yesterday I watched a newly-posted TED presentation, that talked about how our choices change based on comparisons. I recently found some great sources of information. In comparison some of my existing follows started looking less meaningful — I pruned my list.

H. I’ve not found any of the ‘recommendation’ engines to be useful (indeed many of them offer people I’d never consider following). While I still had to do a lot of filtering myself, I did find a lot of meaningful people to follow last week by doing a Twitter search on “Shirky”. Searching on a relevant topic of interest surfaces people talking about same.

I. There’s an acquired form engaging in real debate (an art form). While I am still a student of the craft, I am often very firm in my statements. I do this to take a stand and to engage in a dialog of discovery. I’m surprised to find that there are a lot of people who can’t engage in such exchanges or can’t approach the conversation in the spirit of discovery. This is unfortunate.

In general, there is a wide-open opportunity for automated methods to assist in both finding AND managing follow lists.