All well and good and please don’t think I’m opposed to establishing solid personal connections, which provide the best business. But, as a marketing tool, what’s the return on investment for the time expended? Twitter is very time consuming, even for people good at firewalling off attention, and if you want to be personable then, obviously, you have to stay connected.

The interface is horrendous and there’s a custom and culture of following lots and lots of people, including most people following you. That means you’ll spend a lot of time reading tweets providing you real-time updates about someone’s cat or plans for dinner. Even products like Tweetdeck don’t cure the firehose problem of Twitter, they just help you sort it. Scoble himself noted he had several thousand direct messages, which mean he effectively has zero, since he never reads them.

Given the firehose problem, you’ll probably be lucky to develop more than, say, twenty real relationships, and extremely lucky to get over 100. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just not sure about the overall return for the time spent.

I sure could be wrong — in fact, I’m hoping I am wrong, since I have a Twitter feed and so far enjoy it. I’m particularly hoping it’s a way to connect to local people outside of my normal sphere. But I just want to make sure we’re not all fooling ourselves.

All well and good and please don’t think I’m opposed to establishing solid personal connections, which provide the best business. But, as a marketing tool, what’s the return on investment for the time expended? Twitter is very time consuming, even for people good at firewalling off attention, and if you want to be personable then, obviously, you have to stay connected.

The interface is horrendous and there’s a custom and culture of following lots and lots of people, including most people following you. That means you’ll spend a lot of time reading tweets providing you real-time updates about someone’s cat or plans for dinner. Even products like Tweetdeck don’t cure the firehose problem of Twitter, they just help you sort it. Scoble himself noted he had several thousand direct messages, which mean he effectively has zero, since he never reads them.

Given the firehose problem, you’ll probably be lucky to develop more than, say, twenty real relationships, and extremely lucky to get over 100. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just not sure about the overall return for the time spent.

I sure could be wrong — in fact, I’m hoping I am wrong, since I have a Twitter feed and so far enjoy it. I’m particularly hoping it’s a way to connect to local people outside of my normal sphere. But I just want to make sure we’re not all fooling ourselves.