Twitter - I'm doing it wrong

I read how Robert Scoble had a hard time getting Maryam Scoble to appreciate Twitter, but now she loves it. I've heard that type of story a few times from different people. They don't get Twitter, they sign up for it, they love it.

I used Twitter for a while with a small group of friends. We used it essentially to group chat on certain things mostly pertaining to sports or the election. It allowed different people to interact in different ways. A couple of us used text, some used IM, some Twitter gadgets and others just used twitter.com. When certain events were going on most of us would have some sort of Twitter access to interact with each other. I liked that.

None of us followed anyone else or allowed anyone else to follow us. It was not only narrowed down to "real" friends...but we drilled down even further and went only with a certain group of friends. This seemed useful to me, but I understood it was not what so many others loved about Twitter. Others liked the idea of getting involved in the bigger conversation.

When Yammer came along we moved our conversation over there, at my request, so I could open up Twitter and see what all the fuss was about. So I started following all the A-List bloggers and the others they suggested and the ones they were following and some local people and...I don't get it.

It's not interesting at all really. I have no idea what anyone is talking about. 75% of the posts I see come across Twitter are responses to someone else's tweet. And 99% of the time the person they are responding to is not someone I follow, so I have no idea what the hell any of them are talking about. And even if it was someone I followed, the chance that that person's tweet was anywhere I could currently see were slim to none. How am I supposed to get involved in that?

My settings are set to only show "@ replies to people I'm following". But people don't always use that properly it seems. And to be honest that whole "@username system is pretty lame, at least it seems that way to me. Am I just doing it wrong?

It seems like the worst place to carry on a conversation. Even if I did comment on someone else's comment, I could not see all the other comments that were thrown out...can I? Can I really get involved here? Seriously, am I doing it wrong?

When it was a small group of us it made sense. We were all talking about the same thing and I did not have to @ anyone. It seemed like a great place for a small group to get together.

Twitter seems like it would be a great place to "Microblog" when your talking about a big group though. Tell me what you are doing or thinking in 140 characters. But it only seems useful as one way communication on a large scale. I know that is not very web 2.0, but commenting on someone else's comment that I can't see is not very interesting.

If we are all going to talk about something, and I get to jump in and talk to you with other people you know, that I don't know and I get to talk to those people too - why don't we just do that at Friendfeed? It all makes sense over there.

Maybe I'm just following the wrong people. I probably need to cut out some of the professional tweeters. Send me your username and I'll follow you for a while. Or just follow me (links on the right) and I'll follow back.

I'm not giving up yet. One thing is I have not gotten very involved myself. I don't post a lot on there. I'll start doing that and see if that helps me "get it". If anyone has any suggestions that don't involve loading any additional software etc, I'm open.

I want to like Twitter. The idea of a big conversation seems like a good idea. Twitter just seems like a bad place to have that talk.