Weekend Assignment: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Karen has a weekly assignment at Outpost Mâvarin. This week's assignment is pretty straightforward...

Weekend Assignment #302: Do you Tweet? Why or why not?

Yes, I am a Tweeter...or a Twitterer...or a Twit, whatever the people who use Twitter are calling themselves, and you can find me here. 

I was avoiding social networking sites like the plague; they just didn't seem like my cup of tea.  Several people told me I needed to get on Twitter, but I kept putting them off.  One evening, my wife basically just put me on Facebook, and within a day or two, I finally decided to take the Twitter plunge.  Both have worked out pretty well for me.  On Facebook, I've managed to reconnect with several friends I lost track of over the years.  Twitter has turned out to be a pretty useful tool to quickly get an overview of the day's news events, keep up with the few friends I've found on the site, and occasionally promote my blog.  And although I'm not sure that I could repeat the process, I somehow managed to link my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that anything I tweet shows up on Facebook as a status update.

Extra Credit: If you do use Twitter, how many people follow you? How many do you follow?

It's not my goal to get on Twitter and interact for hours at a time, so I only follow 20 people.  Some are not "people" at all.  I follow MSNBC's and National Public Radio's News and Politics tweets, as well as tweets from AlterNet, ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post.  There are also a few liberal individuals I follow, like Rachel Maddow, Bill Mahre and Thom Hartmann.  Andy Borowitz has funny tweets about the day's events.  I follow a couple of sites that cover NASCAR news, one that was tweeting pretty regularly about the health care debate, and John Scalzi.  The remaining handful are personal online friends.

I'm trying to keep it from getting out of hand.  I like being able to log on to the site and work my way through the tweets that have accumulated since the last time I was on in about half an hour, including time to check out interesting links.  But I'm looking for more people to follow.  I'm interested in useful information, not necessarily what you're having for lunch (unless you're a friend -- then I might be interested).  I like people that tweet often, but not obsessively.  I like people who retweet useful information from the people they follow.

I have 14 followers so far.