On Twitter I follow some 2.000 accounts. Or rather, about 2.000 people can, in theory, send me direct messages. Because it seems pretty much impossible to me to actually follow that many people, I work with lists a lot. Some are by topic, some by location (Berlin), some by type of relationship (work, friends). One is for people who I want to learn more about before deciding if I want to really follow everything they say.
Maybe the most important one for me is called “want to read”. This one has a mere 193 members at this point, and it’s highly curated super picky so I can make sure that I actually read (almost) everything that passes through that list.
Some of the people there are friends, some are colleagues, some are people I find inspiring or whose thoughts I want to learn about. And then there’s a few oddities in there that I found interesting by way of self-observation. Among those 193 Twitter accounts in my want-to-read list there are 18 “things” accounts: products, companies, locations, conferences. There are 3 feeds that just link to new blog posts in blogs I like. (I pretty much retired my RSS reader, even though I’ve been trying to revive it.) And there are 8 fictional characters, mostly from the West Wing. That’s more than 4 percent!
What does it say about me that out of the entities I really want to follow, four percent are fictional?
