David – you have quite an elaborate set up, thanks for sharing.

Justin – good point about staying at a dinner even if it runs longer. I to look at the vast majority periodically throughout the day and then have a main column of people in my TweetDeck that I keep a closer eye on. However, I still don’t read every tweet, I do scroll and scan the one’s I’ve missed but say I’m out of town for a week… and unplugged… I’m probably not going to go back and read all those tweets. Although, I may ask if I missed anything exciting while I was gone.

The vast majority of people I follow I look at from time to time – when I have a few minutes, when somebody retweets or references something, that sort of thing. I just don’t know those people well enough to need to see everything. They’re like the random chatter in the breakroom that I can walk in and out of.

There is a group of about 30 people or so that I want to see all of their tweets. If they Tweet “My house just burned down” or “One of my kids is missing,” I’d like to know about it – I don’t want to be the guy who finds out three days later he should have been being supportive but didn’t know.

Hitting “Clear All” in Seesmic for these would be like walking out of the restaurant in the middle of a dinner with friends. I’m just not comfortable with that, even if dinner runs longer than it should.

I do not read every single update. My setup for the last three years has been as follows:

There are a few people I follow who I want to see every tweet and they get texted to my cell phone. Any other important topic or company that I want to track is sent to my e-mail. The most important are sent in real time and the less important are sent daily.

Now that twitter has lists, I use that to quickly check in to the groups that I have defined.

So to answer your question, “Do you agree?” – Yes I do.

@dmgerbino

Michelle – You inspired this blog post. But maybe the way you are doing it is better. Small intimate vs. large insane. LOL