"You can bump into anybody on Twitter."

Author William Gibson, from a recent New York Magazine interview, talking about Twitter (I also love Twitter, and follow Gibson...he uses it a lot):

You’ve taken to Twitter (GreatDismal).
I have indeed. I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

You have more than 32,000 people following your feed. But you’re only following 87 people. How do you decide whom you’re reading?
I do it on the basis of random encounters, for the most part. Usually the stuff that entertains me has some kind of high-information content. The people I’m following work for me as a sort of conglomerate aggregator of novelty. As it is, with 87 people it’s more than I can take in.

You’re using it in a different way than many other people do. There’s a lot of output on Twitter, not a lot of taking anything else in.
Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.