I recently joined Twitter (my username, as always: xsyn), a micro-blogging service which many of you probably know well by now.

The twittersphere interests me in a number of ways:

1. Different people use the medium in different ways (an instant messenger system, personal branding, geo-locating etc), it almost feels like each person has a primary use preference through which they output into their networks.

2. Locally (South Africa), the twittersphere is comprised of distinct groupings of individuals: 1. Geeks 2. Designers (which I've now labelled aesthetic geeks - in my mind) 3. Bloggers 4. Journalists

I'd like to make an important caveat here, there are individuals outside of these influences, however these are the predominant types.

3. From what I can ascertain from various social networks, who recurse into each other from various social technologies (mailing lists, Facebook etc.)

Again with exceptions, and with the sub-conscious thought banging at the back of my mind that these may simply be the contexts that my own reality tunnels have been adapted to, and as such it's quite likely that I may be seeing similar networks. I'm happy to leave this one open for discussion.

4. This is the point that got me writing this post: I have no idea how a) data travels in the twittersphere b) on what criteria people follow other people.

After a little editing I'm going to talk about b) first due to recent information (strangely enough from Twitter).

From what I've ascertained, there is a kind of unwritten rule that says "You follow me, I'll follow you." Fine and dandy, except that still leaves in the initial social network that you joined with. You can also establish who your peers are following, however this leaves you with the arduous task of actually checking their posts for correlation to your own criteria.

I have a relatively large sphere of influence in a number of circles, so I started my twitter-spree with a small network, which, to be fair, I imagine anybody would, otherwise they wouldn't be twittering. Recently I posted a question to the twittersphere, and with that received a million responses (thanks to @rafiq for guiding me through how that process, I'm not sure if he knew he was doing it, however it was his patterns that I was modeling in order to understand the structure). Following those responses I received a large number of followers, out of the blue. Interesting.

It seems that the easiest way to create followers is simply to ask a question, as and when people reply they use your username as a response, from that response the people following them harvest information about you, etc. etc. It's a nice little personal branding/social media marketing strategy.

Referring back to a). Something interesting happened as I've been typing this. I received a tweet from @NadiaPadayachi. A retweet viral test that links to http://danzarrella.com/viral-tweet-test.

The results may be interesting.

[Post-Publishing-Script]

@uberEllis has made me aware of a couple of other observations which had slipped my little mind:

1. There has been massive corporate adoption of Twitter as a new technology, the pushing of specials on products/services, establishing company persona's, the pushing of information. Etc.

2. The integration of Twitter to Facebook has been an incredibly useful one. Using the a Twitter client to make a tweet, and then the Facebook Twitter Application, you can change your status through a single point of entry. The importance of this is although Twitter itself may only give you access to a particular network (as per my original point 2), the Facebook platform opens that up. Adding another layer of importance: People are more than happy to help with answering questions, both on Twitter and Facebook. There is immediate access to a hive mind out there. This of course raises further questions on the singularity, but I think that's going to be reserved for another post.