# (1 of 5): Mark Smithivas » twitter.com/1god

3 hours, 8 minutes after the fact. (Sat 05 Jan 2008, 11:34 AM CST)

That's a new angle on Twitter I hadn't heard before. Nice job!

# (2 of 5): Munky » myspace.com/munky79

4 days, 22 hours after the fact. (Thu 10 Jan 2008, 7:20 AM CST)

Very very fresh perspective on twitter. I'm tryin' to get all my friends on twitter...perhaps your "Twitter has changed everything blog" would do the job. Thank you!

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# (3 of 5): Andy

6 days, 11 hours after the fact. (Fri 11 Jan 2008, 8:09 PM CST)

Hey matt, can you clarify this portion:

since we congregrate due to shared interests/proximity

I don't know what you mean by proximity, since I take that to be geographical proximity. Are you following/being followed by a lot of Twitter users in your home area? If so how did you discover them? Or did you mean something else by proximity? For example I haven't figured out a way to find other like minded users on Twitter other than if I found them through another source, like their blog.

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# (4 of 5): Matthom

1 week after the fact. (Sat 12 Jan 2008, 11:00 AM CST)

Andy, I do in fact mean geographical proximity - sorry for the confusion. Perhaps I used the wrong word in this case.

Regarding how I found other Twitter users in my area, I somehow found a couple of people, then by simply following who they follow, I started forming a small network based on geographical proximity. Before I knew it, I had a dozen or so followers from Chicago.

There are also tools out there (such as TwitterWhere) that extract the location information from every tweet, and provided a zip code, give you tweets from that area. This is a good way to simply start following random people from your area - again, there is no harm in this - most people will follow you back, and just like that you've made a new contact.

Regarding finding like-minded people on Twitter, like you said - their blogs may advertise their Twitter account, but more so than anything, I find new people by following friends of friends. This is the best way. Not everyone has a blog, and more so with Twitter users, because Twitter has become the new way to blog. Very little overhead, instant networking - why bother with cumbersome blog packages? (for the newbie that is)

For every new person I meet based on proximity or similar interests, there are usually five more that extend off of that person. It just keeps multiplying.

Another unique way - you could also @reply someone who doesn't follow you (they'll still see the @reply even though they don't follow you), and perhaps they'll start following you after that. Some of the "A list" Twitter users, such as Gruber, Zeldman, Scoble, etc - they purposely only follow a close-nit group of people simply because they can't keep up with every single person following them. However, you can still start dialogue with them whenever you'd like.

Hope that helps.

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# (5 of 5): Andy

1 week, 4 days after the fact. (Wed 16 Jan 2008, 12:50 PM CST)

I think that last point, start a dialog is interesting. The recipient doesn't have to "follow you" actively but could potentially answer or participate. Furthermore there is no mutual connection requirement so people feel free to @reply anytime.

I think if anything, Twitter exemplifies how "simple" can be a winning strategy/philosophy. As a busy person, you might want to dialog with someone, but not set up a blog and see you can attract, instead you can target them directly with @replies while still broadcasting to everyone the same message.

An interesting twist on this would be if Wordpress and other engines had public and private user targeting for a specific post. You could also extend that idea and even show different content in the post, perhaps an excerpt only for public, and the full post for private.

Anyway thanks, I'll keep playing with Twitter.

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