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> - I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.

That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately. Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you. BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...

Actually this is one of the things that makes twitter so useful. With email the person can pretend that they didn't get your email ("it must have ended up in my junk mail folder"), while with twitter it is all public.

> If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective.

I am convinced, completely convinced, that the idea that you have to read every tweet in your timeline is why so many people don't get Twitter. Even constraining yourself like you describe seems just so silly. I follow 300 people, some of whom (manually) tweet A hundred times a day. I don't read all of them. I dip in and out as I have a few minutes of downtime.

It's a distributed sort of vaguely topical bar chatter. Trying to follow the whole thing is insane, and you have lists if you want to curate particular people.

> Trying to follow the whole thing is insane

It's only insane when you follow a huge amount of people and/or people who tweet a lot (or worse, both).

I'll make exception for a handful of companies/organizations (e.g. WSJ, NASA) but generally I won't follow accounts that tweet more than once or twice a day.

Trying to follow the whole thing is insane. Not exposing yourself to what's there is, too.

I may have misunderstood you. I thought by "whole thing" you were referring to everything that shows up in your timeline, but seems you probably were referring to all of Twitter.

Like I said, I follow 300 people. But I don't break my ass to read everything by everyone. I dip in and out, because anything interesting is going to pop back up eventually and having that broad a cross-section of people to follow exposes me to more and more interesting people.

This is almost exactly how I use it as well. I find Twitter to be incredibly valuable, even though I scoffed at it for a couple years before finally signing up.

I also know many people who game their main feed by reciprocally following everyone for audience building, then set up lists for groups they actually care about. This makes the main view too noisy for me, but I could see that as a viable strategy.

> I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much

You might want to check out a small side-project of mine[1] which I created because I also don't like to follow people who tweet too much. Just put in a username and it'll show you how many times a day (on average) they tweet.

[1] https://www.shouldifollow.com/