Warning - this is one of those tedious posts where people write about their social media strategies rather than just getting on with them. Apologies.
Anyway.
I liked twitter a lot more when you could get it via SMS (which you can't now, in the UK, not without doing complicated stuff that's not worth it). I liked that you could then use it in different ways depending where you were and what you were doing.
I used to follow loads of twittering streams but only set up a much smaller number for SMS. This seemed to work well. SMS was kept for people I was likely to bump into, or people I knew well. At home, via twitterific I was happy to see almost anything burble by in the twitterstream.
When SMS access went away I really missed it. I liked those little buzzes of update popping up all the time. Now, when I'm away from m'computer I have to check the mobile twitter site on my phone, which is fine, but it's really making clear how much twitter is filling up with all sorts of other stuff. And I think I need another bifuraction strategy to sort the twitters I want while I'm out and about and the ones I want dribbling ambiently into a big display.
So, I'm going to start some social pruning on the regular account - leaving people that I might bump into, might want to bump into, or know well enough to want to know what they're about with an unseemly amount of haste. This is partly for attention management purposes, partly because I'm not sure I want loads of people I don't know reading all my twitters. Some days I mind, some days I don't. But, anyway I'm going to get a lot more discriminating with letting people in there. To see how that feels.
And I've started the Undermanager account for following delightful objects, fictional people, company puppets, people I don't know well but like the sound of, people who seem to have stopped twittering much, people I'm unlikely to bump into, people who mostly twitter about the fact that they've written a blogpost etc etc. I'm not having a go at these things at all. They're all part of the rich tapestry of twitter. But I'd like to catch-up with them at my leisure, on my computer, not at the post office, while paying money to Orange. And I might use the Undermanager account for those things myself. Not the 'going to get a coffee stuff' but the 'I've written a blogpost' 'listened to a track on blip' stuff. The Undermanager is life admin. If you'd like to follow it, that would be delightful. If you wouldn't, that would be understood.