Thanks for the comment.
Twitter can be overwhelming, yet a lot of fun.
I personally recommend to not auto follow and to not auto direct message new users.
The reasons are that,
If you auto follow your twitter stream gets filled up with comments from people you do not care about. It takes a little time, but if yuo go to your followers each day or few and just look at your new followers twitter provides the last tweet from them and then decide ifyou like the tweet. If you do like the last tweet click the follow button, otherwise just pass on following that person and review the next new follower.

I suggest to not auto direct message new users.
My favorite twitter users like @WarrenWhitlock, @MariSmith and @CoachDeb all prefer to not get auto direct messages for new users and I am pretty sure we all turned off receiving auto DM’s at all with tweetlater or socialtoo. Auto DM is not a conversation and twitter should be about a conversation.

If you have a iPhone you can install tweetie and then when you are standing in line at checkout or hanging out, you can quickly scan your twitter stream and reply to someone or Retweet a tweet that you really like or believe will benefit your followers.

Occasionally I suggest tweeting about your successes and if it has a link to your web site, it builds page rank juice. Like you could tweet about your how proud you are of your Cisco presentation and then provide a link to that page on your web site. ovalpeg.com/portfolio_presentations.html. This helps others know you and may provide valuable information for them even showing how a professional presentation should look.

One other thing is to follow new people as you find them. If one of your favorite twitter friends suggests following someone, then just click through and follow them. Also you can go to tweetlocal and other twitter resources to find people to follow in your same line of business or with your same interest. Once you do this you will enjoy your twitter stream more and find it more enticing to retweet or just to read.

Let me know if this helps.
Clay
@ClayFranklin

PS: I loved your school project and just asked Kelly what theme you used. If you get a chance send the link to me on twitter or post it here.

I’m your class mate, great blog! I have a twitter account at http://twitter.com/Ovalpeg. I have been tweeting regularly for a couple of months now and have an automatic follow and automatic response set up. My problem is that there are so many tweets that I can’t focus on anything or anyone. Twitter as a receiver is virtually useless to me at the moment. I even have tweet deck, but I just can’t manage to focus on anything productive so I never even launch it.

So instead I only transmit tweets (from a http://www.netvibes.com dashboard) because I can focus and tweet weekly about something interesting related to my business in presentation design and web content as well as my interests in art and entrepreneurship. I also have my tweets automatically feeding into my Facebook page simply for the relief of not having to come up with unique Facebook content.

I actually do like social networking, but time and focus are always issues for me. Can you help me figure out how to be a productive receiver of tweets?

~Hally