.random[oid]archive

As an introvert I prefer to be able to give my friends and those who have important things to say my full attention. When I say full attention I mean I will hear or read every word they say or write. This is something I also do on Twitter.

At the moment I am following 83 people, but lately I think only half of them are actually tweeting. So let us say that less than 40 tweeple are tweeting everyday. That should be easy to follow, right?

Being unemployed I have a lot of time on my hands. I get up around between seven and eight in the morning everyday and I go to bed around ellevenish at night. During my waking time I make brekky, lunch, dinner, do the dishes, read the news, watch TV, blog and spend time with Lizzie (in random order). I still find it time-consuming enough keeping up with the people I am following on Twitter. Even when I had a job I thought about excluding people as I found it hard keeping track of all the tweets.

One of the reason this might be is that I want to read every tweet posted by the tweeple I follow that shows up in my (home) stream; I do not read @ replies not visible to me. If I were to follow, let us say, 303 I would probably do nothing than reading and possibly replying to tweets, and between that I would be tweeting myself and retweeting things.

I can only base this assumption on my own experience and observation. People who follow in the 1000+ or even 10.000+ figure must be either doing nothing than sitting in front of their computer and watching their Twitter (home) stream or missing out on a huge number of tweets.
I honestly can not believe these people can give their full attention for that many people. I would love to see the science behind that.

I assume about 40 of my tweeps tweet within a 24h time frame. Let us assume they tweet 10 things within that 24h time frame. That means I might be reading about 400 tweets a day. If anyone can claim to be able to read 400.000 tweets from the 40.000 tweeps they follow within a 24 time frame I would love to know how they do it.

I timed myself when reading and writing a 138 character long tweet. It took me 6 seconds to read it and 30 seconds to type it.
That means, it takes me 24 hours to read 14400 tweets. That means that when I sit down in front my my computer and log in to Twitter I sit there for 24 hours doing nothing else. If I do not want to tweet I can send out 28800 tweets instead during those 24 hours.

Just for fun, let us say you follow 40.000 tweeple and they only tweet once during a period of 24 hours, it is impossible for you to read all those tweets in one day, even if you spent 24 hours in front of your computer. Even if it takes you to two seconds to read a tweet it is still impossible (24h = 86.400s).

Keep in mind I am not being negative towards people who follow a lot of people, I am just being realistic and scientific. Some are claiming to do something that is technically and also humanly impossible.

I guess I prefer quality over quantity; and being realistic.
And to hear/read everything a person tries to tell me.

Note: If my math is incorrect, please let me know; but this is not brain science or rocket surgery, so I doubt I managed to bollock it.