Even though I berated twitter here, enough people I know appeared on twitter to make me use the service. According to me Twitter is all about conversations. Here is my simple strategy.

1. Tweet or else you don't exist ;-), I normally clean up contacts on both follow and followers list. If I don't know you, you follow me and all you say on your profile is "Hi", "I came back from n-hangout" then I block you. If I follow you and you don't say much ever I un-follow you.

2. Have conversations , I follow very few people who don't engage in conversations. Conversations need not be real time but nobody likes monologue. So if you are a one-way broadcast marketer or a social media twitterfly and don't engage in conversations then it is likely I won't follow you.

3. Clean up of follow lists Nice and clean follow list. I block all spammers or one way broadcasters from my follow lists. There are interesting people in my follow list who I try to have conversations with. Even more important for me is that my followers browsing through my followed by list find those interesting people.

4. Vary of large numbers Normally I wouldn't follow you if you follow 100s of people and 100s of people follow you back. Which means that we won't have much conversation space. Again there are exceptions to the rule.

Connect with me at @tarundua81

I made a new friend on my gtalk list. Its called update@identi.ca
twitter@twitter.com died long back on me and I was never able to get it to work after that.

Rest In Peace Twitter. So long and thanks for all the fish.

People who wish to follow my microblog can go to http://identi.ca/tarundua81 instead of http://twitter.com/tarundua80

If wishes were ... . A very basic open source twitter clone has started to come up at twoorl.com. Once they have IM support they'll be half-way there and I'll start to think of it as a twitter competitor.

Twitter is not only down most of the time but their funny downtime messages are even more annoying. Its been 3 days since I last saw the twitter@twitter.com bot present online on my gtalk. I don't know whats wrong with them and I don't care to investigate. And no I don't think Pownce cuts it as a simple communication and micro-blogging tool, its way too complex and convoluted for simple twitter like usage. Shall wait for a reasonable twitter replacement to come up.
Here is my small list of features which I would retain and junk the rest.

1. An embeddable widget for Blogs which shows your micro-blog/sidenotes you and or with your friends sent to this new service.
2. An RSS feed of the above two
3. A Jabber bot that you can add to communicate with from any Jabber messaging service like gtalk, jabber.org etc.
4. Compatibility with existing twitter clients.
5. SMS/E-mail integration. E-mail integration can maybe use a strategy of using a unique but changeable guid in the subject line as a spam avoidance technique for auto-approval of messages.
6. A simple configuration page to follow and approve followers, configuration for IM/E-mail GUID/Mobile.

Drop me an line if you are interested in developing this application.