How do you use Twitter | KeyContent.org.... Unlocking Communication

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...I think I might be doing it all wrong...

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The appointment of KeyContent's own Bill Albing as one of top 25 most influential technical communication bloggers (congratulations, by the way!) got me thinking about Twitter. While the list is quite good, there were lots of folks who I think are quite influential (at least to me) that were missing. I also wondered about the actual data-collection methodology.

I posted a comment on the Mindtouch blog with some of my questions as well as suggestions for additional clarification.

One of the items that seemed to be used to calculate influence was Twitter followers. This assumption that you have to follow someone to be influenced by them made me about how I use Twitter and wonder if I'm doing it all wrong.

I use TweetDeck as my primary Twitter client. One of its great features is the ability to create Twitter streams based on Twitter searches. One of my interests is Content Management Systems. I've created a Twitter search stream based on:

Keywords such as CMS and content
Phrases such as content management and web CMS
Hastags such as #CMS and #UX

I can include complex boolean logic, too, so that I only see CMS-related #UX tweets (instead of every tweet with the #UX hashtag). Likewise, I have multiple columns in TweetDeck dedicated to my other interests. This also allows me to "weed out" miscellaneous tweets. Bill, I love reading most of what you tweet, but I'm not that interested in what you're eating for lunch! :-)

So even though I'm not actively following specific people, I am influenced by specific tweets (when their tweet matches one of my searches). But they don't get "credited" as an influencer of @ricksapir because I don't follow them.

I'm curious if I'm the only person using searches as my primary Twitter interface.

How do you use Twitter?