Charles Nutter talks about reducing the number of people he’s following on Twitter. Here’s a quote from the post:

To me, the value of Twitter is both in keeping track of what people I respect are working on or find interesting and as a sort of micro-feed, a little forced 2-second thought break to help me step back from hard problems. Whether you buttered your toast on the bottom or found an unrecognizable lump of once-food in the refrigerator is worthless to me…so if that’s the tweets you’re inflicting on the world, why should I begin or continue to follow you?

That’s certainly one point of view. And one to which I am diametrically opposed. I mean, sure, if my friends want to tell me about what they are working on or find interesting, that’s all well and good. But really, I enjoy knowing if my friends butter the top or bottom of their toast, or if they found a lump of unrecognizable once-food in the refrigerator. That’s why I want to use Twitter, and that’s the entire reason I use Twitter. In fact, I’m sure if more of my friends realized how easy it was to use, and that they didn’t have to compose entire blog entries to let people know what’s up, I’d be even more happy. I subscribe to the Facebook status update for my friends, and that’s more of the same, but it helps me keep tabs on what’s going on with my peeps.

If every post from my Twitter friends were “writing a new Cocoa script”, or “Got my Ruby execution time down by 50%”, I’d be bored out of my mind. I want to know where my friends are, what they’re doing, what they’re eating, all of that. Of course, I don’t want to know that about just any random person who decides to follow me on Twitter. But if it’s someone I know, bring on the reviews of the new NIN album, the destruction of bath mats, the TV marathons, the smells on the train, and tha ma’fxckin’ book videos (NSFW).

Of course, the beauty of the Twitter, is that both Charles Nutter and Nels Wadycki can get what they want from the same application.