Increasingly long-winded thoughts on Twitter, which is why I'm not very good on Twitter

Thoughts on Twitter, from the perspective of one who came from Facebook.

• It's very good for my editing, trying to get what I want to say down to 140 characters.
• But it's a terrible way to have an actual conversation.
• The people, myself included, are more fickle. Because there's no mutuality, you can follow and unfollow guilt-free. I follow someone famous for a while, their too-frequent, or too-boring tweets annoy me, I unfollow them. I suppose in FB we just hide the status updates; unfriending is a lot more drastic.
• The people are more willing to listen to total strangers. On FB, generally speaking, I won't friend someone I haven't met unless I know exactly who they are and feel I have some sort of connection with them on a message board or through blogging. On Twitter a whole bunch of total strangers follow me. I don't even know why, but it's all very ego-stroking. (I mean, I don't know why they follow me. I do know why it strokes the ego.)
• And then, even more surprisingly, total strangers seem willing to engage with me in some sort of exchange. A usually frustrating one if I'm trying to actually impart information (see point 2 above) but not a bad one if we're just tossing quips back and forth. Or insults. Whatever.
• I've had a Facebook page for the blog for a couple of years now and it's just creaking up to 73 likes. I've been on Twitter since January of this year and already I have 80 followers. How does that work? And then some of my followers are corporate-type things that, what, think I'll just blindly follow them back? Does anyone do that? How is that good for business?
• And then, I don't understand how people can follow thousands of others. The Bloggess, to take a "famous" blogger, for example, has 320,000 followers. Lucky her. But she follows 19,000 herself. She can't read 19,000 people's tweets. Even if some of them don't tweet much. I doubt if she even clicked the "Follow" button 19,000 times, for that matter. So how does this happen, and what's the point? Do people just follow people to be nice, and then ignore them? I follow people whose tweets I want to see, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

In summary, I'm finding Twitter surprisingly nice. It connects me with old and new people in the blogging community in an oddly different way from Facebook, in Ireland and the US (and elsewhere too for all I know). I thought it would just be covering the same ground again, but it's complementary rather than duplicatory. So, um, go click the button over there and follow me.