After a few years of Twitter use I’ve found that, through trial and error, to keep a signal vs. noise balance and keeping the value of Twitter high enough for me to keep using it  - I only follow a very few number of people (52 as of this writing) compared to the number of people that follow me (1,609 as of this writing).

It isn’t that I do not want to follow everyone back. I do. I’m actually pretty interested in the mundane. Whether you are involved in interesting projects, run a cool company, or just have an average life – I want to read about it. But when I tried that, I ended up not being able to keep up with Twitter at all. It was impossible. I missed important Tweets. I eventually ended up completely ignoring Twitter. The same thing happened to me on Flickr. Whenever my family would ask me “Did you see my latest photo on Flickr?” and I’d have to answer that I hadn’t – I knew I had too many Flickr contacts.

So, that is why I asked for everyone’s blog URL. If I can’t follow you on Twitter, I’m going to subscribe to your blog. That is my way of paying you back for following me. If your blog is interesting, well written, about a topic I like – I’ll probably be subscribed for years to come. In fact, I may even link to it or suggest that other’s subscribe!

So, to all of you that responded and gave me your blog’s URL. I’m now subscribed to it and am looking forward to reading what you’re up to. Thanks for following me on Twitter.

My site is setup to post links to Twitter, every 15 minutes, if there was a new post here on my site. I try to add a little context by adding the category before the Twitter status (e.g. “Link:”) and I also include the title of the note so that people can choose whether or not to click the link from Twitter back to my site.

But I could see this getting pretty annoying for some.

Someone whose opinion I value, Justin Blanton, had said in October 2007, on Twitter no less, that he didn’t like the whole “use Twitter to link to your blog” method of letting people know when you update your site. In some ways I agree with him but in others I find it fairly useful when I am not near Twitter to automate the process. I’m torn.

This process all started when I started to post mobile photos with my iPhone. At first they were going to Flickr and so I once Flickr updated the RSS feed for my photos, I had a script that would notify Twitter of the new photo. Once I began to post my mobile photos here on my site, I figured I would do the same thing.

This slowly expanded into, what is now, a script that will post to Twitter every single time I publish something to my site.

So, I ask – should I continue this? Is it annoying? It is useful? Should I only do it for mobile photos and nothing else? Please let me know in the comments.