… next thing I remember, I am walkin’ down the street
I’m feeling all right, I’m with my boys, I’m with my troops, yeah …
Paul Simon, “Late in the Evening“

Every time I think of my Twitter network, I can’t help recalling the phrase “with my troops, yeah” from the Paul Simon song, Late in the Evening (here, on YouTube). I’m old enough that the lyrics also remind me of the choreographed street gangs in the 1961 movie version of “West Side Story,” (here, on YouTube) but I realize that the generation who grew up in the 1980s is more likely to visualize Michael Jackson and his fellow zombies in the 1982 video, “Thriller.” As for the people who were born in 1982, and who are just coming of age now, I don’t have a clue what videos would illustrate what I’m talking about here. Maybe Feist’s 1234? (Wikipedia informs me that Leslie Feist was born on February 13, 1976.)

Okay, so what’s this all about? Well, there are nearly 700,000 people on the Twitter social network (see my earlier blog, “Phooey! Twitter is NOT dangerous!” if you’re completely unfamiliar with Twitter), and a lot of my friends and colleagues seem to think that all 700,000 operate as a howling mob, bombarding each other 24 hours a day with trivial details of their boring lives. But nothing could be further from the truth; and I think if people had a better understanding of how it functions, perhaps more people would join in.

The key thing, you see, is that each Twitterer chooses the network of people he wants to “follow” (i.e., the individuals whose Twitter updates, known as “tweets,” he wants to see). And while other members of the 700,000 subscriber base can independently decide whether they want to follow you, you have the option of “blocking” any of your would-be followers. Hence, each of us on Twitter has his own network of followers, as well as an overlapping (potentially identical) network of people that we follow. My network is unlikely to be the same as yours, though we may have one or more fellow Twitterers in common.

But “network” is too formal, to abstract, too impersonal a term … and you can sense that by looking at the numbers associated with each person’s followers and followees on their own Twitter “home page.” Some people are incredibly lonely, with only one or two followers. I’d call them “loners,” but if that were the case, why would they be on Twitter in the first place? And you can’t really call them “ugly” or “fat” or “unpopular” — after all, it’s rare that we see anything other than a stylized thumbnail-size mugshot of each Twitterer and most of them are people we’ve never met personally. No … they’re just lonely: they haven’t figured out how to attract any followers yet.

Most Twitterers have somewhere between 10 and 100 followers (I’ve got 84 at the moment, and if you decide to follow me by clicking here, the number might grow to 85. Maybe even 86!). I guess you’d call them my “troops,” my “pack”, or perhaps (in deference to the “tweet” metaphor), my “flock.” But you wouldn’t call your followers a “mob”; as I’ll discuss below, they tend to be well-behaved, and they quickly learn the social protocols of Twitterland.Meanwhile, some people have armies of followers, the size of which you can see at the Twitter directory “top 100 followed” page . For example, as of this morning, Robert Scoble (TwitterID Scobleizer) had 6,890 followers — and, amazingly, claims that he himself is following 6,951 other Twitterers. And the number-two person is Justine (Twitter ID “ijustine”) from Pittsburgh, whose tagline is “I am the Internet”. As of this morning, she had 6,712 followers, but had the good sense to limit herself to following a mere 617 other people.

If you were at a cocktail party with a dozen other people whom you knew, chances are you could manage to talk to each of them, at least for a brief period of time, during the course of the evening. If you showed up at a cocktail party and found that you were one of 100 guests, all of whom looked familiar — either by name, face, or speech — chances are that you’d wander around, listening to snatches of other peoples’ conversations, and occasionally murmuring pleasantries of your own. Perhaps you’d pause for a few moments to talk briefly, in more depth, with a small circle of people in the room. And if a new person suddenly joined that small circle, chances are you’d behave in an appropriate manner.

In Twitterland, the “new person” is indicated by an email message that says,

Hi, Ed Yourdon.

XXX YYY (zzz) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out XXX YYY’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/zzz

You may follow XXX YYY as well by clicking on the “follow” button.

Best,

Twitter

Though I can’t imagine that people like Scobleizer and ijustine do this, the rest of us Twitterers quickly learn (by observing similar behavior on the part of other Twitterers) that the polite protocol for acknowledging new followers is:

1. Check out the new follower’s Twitter page, and read whatever he says about himself, .
2. Return the courtesy by clicking “follow”. After all, if he’s following you, then you should follow him.
3. Visit your new follower’s web page, if he’s got one — so you know something specific about him.
4. Post a “welcome” tweet that says “Welcome new follower @zzz — how’s the weather where you live, in Mumbai?”

If someone barged into your small circle of friends and colleagues at a cocktail party, and immediately attempted to monopolize the conversation with loud, rude, obnoxious chatter, the situation could get a little awkward. But on Twitter, it’s not a problem: if your new follower begins bombarding you with tweets that you get tired of seeing — for whatever reason — all you have to do is “un-follow” him; the great thing is that he won’t even know, unless he checks very, very carefully. And if he’s really annoying, you can “block” his messages.

“Blocking” is occasionally important because, while most of your tweets are broadcast to everyone on your list of followers, there are two ways of “personalizing” the communication. The most common one takes the form “@zzz blah blah blah,” which is a “public” response to a previous tweet from @zzz to you. But you can also send a “direct” tweet to another Twitterer, which goes only to that individual. And if you’ve got an obnoxious follower who bombards you with unwanted “direct” tweets, the only obvious defense is to block him. But that rarely happens; I’ve un-followed a few followers (only because they babbled incessantly about things that bore me to death, like cricket and opera), but I’ve never had to block anyone.

Here are a few other “protocol” items to keep in mind if you become a Twitterer:

1. You can link Twitter to Facebook, so that each new Twitter posting acts as a Facebook “status update.” If you’re already a Facebook user, you can accomplish that with a Facebook app called Twittersync.
2. You can link Twitter to your blog, so that each new blog posting eventually generates a brief tweet on Twitter. Don’t ask me how that’s done — I did it a couple days ago, and I can’t remember. But trust me, it was simple.
3. Learn how to use TinyURL, because you can’t squeeze a lot of detail into the 140-character constraint of Twitter messages, and quite often you want to tell your troops about some cool Web page you’ve found — but the URL itself is 145 characters long…
4. Organize your various computing devices so you can access Twitter from wherever you happen to be, and whatever device/platform you happen to be logged in on. You’ll occasionally want to use the main twitter.com Web page — but you probably won’t see the steady, running stream of Tweets if that Web page is in a tab/window that is obscured by whatever “serious” Web page you’re using in your day-to-day job. So you’ll want to play around with separate client programs like Twitterific, Snitter, Twhirl, and others — many of them in beta, several of them use Adobe’s highly unstable AIR platform, and a few of them have UI’s that drive people crazy. I’m using Twhirl at the moment, but it’s relatively easy to switch from one to the other… While you’re at it, read the details on Twitter’s home page about how to send/receive tweets from your mobile phone; that way, you can stay connected all the time.
5. Pay sufficient attention to the chatter and flow of messages amongst your followers and followees, so you can better understand the balance they strike between personal (“Okay, that’s it for the morning. Off to lunch and the gym, back mid-afternoon for more work… twitter on, dudes!” from me earlier today) and business topics (“Pew Internet: ‘Teens embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media’ – via Techmeme http://tinyurl.com/32krcd” from @alexdc a couple days ago; casual (“Listening to RCRD LBL on my flight!” from @alisamleo a couple hours ago) versus informative (“active Twitter users in India: 66 Mumbai, 46 Delhi, 145 Bangalore, 66 Chennai, 35 Hyderabad” from @Gauraunomics a few hours ago). It will give you a sense of how you can participate in the ongoing chatter and get the most benefit from it.

All of this is still fairly new, and I think it will be several months, if not a couple of years before we see any kind of “best practices” book or manual for Twitter; and it’s likely to continue evolving as the technology (both Twitter, and also its supporting feed/reader programs) changes. For example, I suddenly realized that I’d love to have a simple way to archive all of my Twitter feeds, so I could search through previous messages for something useful; in particular, I was trying to remember who sent me a tweet about the idea of writing a book along the lines of Twitter for Dummies. But I can’t find it; if archiving and searching is available in the Twitterverse, it’s not obvious to me. But that’s okay; it’s almost certain to appear, in one form or another, in the weeks and months to come.

In the meantime, there’s plenty to learn, and plenty of pleasure and benefit to be derived from the current state of Twitter. So, create your own flock, your own network of Twitter troops — and join the fun!