Then I can choose to subscribe to Ew4n's 1 and 2, Whatley's 1, Ben's 1/2/3 (love them banalities there Mr Smith .

(Not representative, or meant to signify anything at all chaps, Other MIR Tweets are available)

As a Tweeter, I don't want to *force* all following me (particularly industry friends) to read about what my 7 Chickens are up to, or turn me off. But my relatives are all ears for the Poultry News. I want to be able to rate my own tweets, so I don't force others to read what might not be at all what they started following me for.

As Ewan says elsewhere, some folks I'd love to read everything from – The Fry, for starters. Other twitterers are already getting on my limited-attention-span radar as a source of noise, and thus I'm in danger of turning them off and missing the 'Just got engaged/divorced/locked up/knocked up' tweet.

c'mon Twitter – let me Rate My Tweet.

/m

Every criticism you level at Twitter also stands for the regular web / blogs. You don't just browse through Blogger's frontpage or WordPress.com and expect it all to be relevant or even 'good'… you use knowledge and tools to find what's relevant. Twitter just *looks* a bit different.

Twitter isn't about telling the world what your doing… it can be, but it doesn't have to be. It's micro-blogging – blogging being the operative word.

Without such services, you'd be forced to subscribe to absolutely every single 'I'm having a cup of coffee. Again' tweets. Correct? You'd be sat waiting… WAITING for the 'And I think DELL is rubbish too' point, ready to jump in.

There is absolutely no way you can argue against my bullshit point. Fundamentally Twitter is about ego. You're telling the world what 'you are doing' and you're defining exactly what the world is going to hear. YES I shall tell the world about this cup of coffee. Or this banana. Or the little Robin Redbreast that's sat on the wall. And I'll also tell them a brilliant, brilliant piece of news about something actually useful to people. If anything, the monitoring services are what keep the wider Twitter community interested. Otherwise they'd all be of the same opinion as Bryony in the post above.

For example, being able to guage the online opinion of millions of people and track the evolution of major news stories is certainly of interest to me (as a PR) and should be even more interesting to journalists.

I could list a lot more :0) Perhaps it's time to take another look?

– networking
– useful 'stuff'
– fun!