1. Because my main account needs to follow everyone who is following me for DM reasons. - Robert Scoble

2. But that means I can't closely follow my friends and people I've met face-to-face. - Robert Scoble

3. Following 100,000 means you'll only randomly see Tweets, and you'll miss too much good stuff. - Robert Scoble

4. There's no way you can completely follow more than a few hundred people. So, if you've followed more than 1,000 you need two accounts. - Robert Scoble

5. I've been using this technique here on FriendFeed for more than a year and it really rocks (FriendFeed lets you split your friends up into lists, while Twitter forces you to get more than one account). - Robert Scoble

http://twitter.com/notsecr... is my second account. - Robert Scoble

or use TweetDeck, right? I haven't used it, but I understand it lets you group/prioritize the people you follow - Joshua Maurice

Scoble, this solution doesn't seem to scale. In another year does this mean you'll have a supersecret account that only follows select people from the secret account? - Ryan Jones

so one account for people you really want to follow and one for everyone that you follow back at both FF and Twitter? - bev

Guy Kawasaki does this right?: - Steve Rubel

Robert: makes sense...but what is the advantage of 2 accounts compared to Groups - Edwin Khodabakchian

I use TweetDeck to organize my close friends into a list. That way, it's really easy for me to just follow those who are close to me, but still get DMs from everyone. - Eric Pender

Is there a client aka Tweetdeck that allows you to pull in your Friendfeed friend's lists? - Stephen Kennedy

... or any other BETTER filtering service than Tweetdeck, like PeopleBrowsr. - Alan Veeck

Edwin: none, except that Twitter does not support groups and I'm not going to invest the time to build them in, say, TweetDeck when there's so much innovation going on in Twitter clients. - Robert Scoble

There are more than a few Twitter usability issues that I'd like to see changed in addition to the required multiple accounts, deleting of DM's being easier and organizing of people as well....Tweetdeck allows this but Twitter should have thought of this internally... - Walter Schwabe

This seems like a lot of effort to deal with the problem of courtesy refollows. Why not just follow those 500 people or so on your main Twitter account? If you don't care what people say publicly and they're just noise, why deal with the acres of spammers sending you DMs to shill for some crappy product? - Trent Hamm

bev: right, I think. Ryan: yeah, this probably doesn't scale. But for now it does. - Robert Scoble

My Twitter numbers are strikingly similar to my FF numbers - when it comes to followers / followees. I've never broken 1000 when it comes to people I follow and every so often I go through and prune my list to help tune the noise. I've given up on Twitter and really focus most of my effort on my FF friends. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I see. the 2 account approach makes it portable across twitter client. smart - Edwin Khodabakchian

With Seesmic Desktop I created groups like "China, Hong Kong, France, Ogilvy, etc etc" and it works fine - Jean-François Amadei

Alan: for instance, if I had spent the time doing that on TweetDeck, now I'm using Seesmic Web. So I'd have to recreate the groups. - Robert Scoble

Robert: What is you 2nd FF account? - wiredgnome

Tweetdeck became a necessity after 100 follows. I have groups and I rarely add to them- which means that me following you on twitter means virtually nothing as I rarely read the main feed. I can see this really corrupting your % followers to followed, which I do care about. Anyways, FF does make this a more feasible situation, to follow lots of people and still interact with them. Whereas with Twitter I'd have to resort to 2 accoutns. - anna sauce

Amir: I only have one, but I have several lists of friends. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Do you recommend that technique to everyone? - wiredgnome

I jus noticed, you don't follow me on twitter for DMs. heart breaking, that must be why you never answer me on twitter :P - Özgür D. Cyric

Has anyone tried http://www.grouptweet.com/? I like its features, makes it easy to have private groups on twitter. - Nagesh C

I do the same, and it greatly improved my twitter experience. now i never miss what my close buds are saying. - sean percival

Looking through the list, I noticed you follow lots of people, but not a lot of feed type accounts. No newspapers, rss crossposts, etc... It's all people, maybe discuss why? - Jim Graham

Seesmic is a good little program, not as "weird feeling" as Tweetdeck. - Gus

will they add tags/filters on twitter? would be nice, but one thing which makes twitter great is its simplicity - diegovanegas

Amir: either that technique or join FriendFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

I follow millions at a time with my one Twitter account. :-) - http://staynalive.com/article... - Jesse Stay

Jim: because I want to view my news through the filter of people I know. - Robert Scoble

To me the conflict between DM and tweets proves a weakness in the twitter concept, so why not pushing them to address that. You can set up a massive vote for something like this. - Jcm Manuel

Jcm: if Twitter listened to me they would get rid of the Suggested User List. I'd rather not beat my head against a brick wall. - Robert Scoble

So this new one is basically Scoble using Twitter the way everyone else does? - Jan Dawson

There must be a proper way to combine things. Twitter is all about limitations, but if they force people to have 2 accounts, there's clearly something that sux. - Jcm Manuel

Jan: most of the people I'm following have thousands of friends. This one is more picky. - Robert Scoble

I don't see how you keep up with them both. - Kevin Montgomery

Kevin you can keep up by using tweedteck or seesmic (allow for multiple accounts) - Jcm Manuel

Kevin: multiple screens. And I don't look at 100,000 people very often. The noise there is extraordinary. - Robert Scoble

With your 2nd twitter account, you pretty much can ignore the first one, but use second one to broadcast to a much bigger group. One for socializing, one for broadcasting? - Nagesh C

I know.....I use tweetdeck, but between email, myspace, facebook, twitter......it's ALOT of noise. I'm struggling to actually engage on twitter they way I would like. Robert, do you remember me from the Himmelman/Skin tour? - Kevin Montgomery

I bet that your DMs will diminish on the first account pretty soon, if not already - Nagesh C

That's a great idea, especially for someone like you. How can you even keep up with all of these comments on your posts? FF is definitely much more logical and organized than Twitter. I only use Twitter for those who don't have FF, and then I just have imaginary friends. I hardly ever go to Twitter (in any form). - Californian

Nagesh: the smart people DM me on FriendFeed already, yes. - Robert Scoble

I don't have the problem of thousands of people I follow, but I do know that before I follow someone, I look to the posting behavior. If he/she's posting just a few good messages per day I follow, it it's a spammer like Scoble I don't follow - unless he's called Scoble of course LOL. But my approach is to choose very carefully. - Jcm Manuel

By the way, the whole LINKING between services sux too. For instance, I follow Scoble on another twitter account. But when it linked to friendfeed, it logged in with my other account (I have 2 accounts there as well) - because in the browser you always log in with the account you last logged in (unless the session has expired). I didn't even notice that I didn't "friendfeed" with the account that sent me here. There's very little control over all these things - I make errors like this very often. - Jcm Manuel

Aren't most of the people you've met face to face on Friendfeed with feeds from Twitter/blogs/facebook/etc..? In terms of broadcasting, feed the main Twitter account and use FF to filter, as you mentioned. Seems simple enough, am I missing something? - Benjamin Taylor

Some 2 hours ago I was looking on the Seesmic site if they had some public planning of developments, but I couldn't find it. I would love to know what they plan - e.g. if they plan to add friendfeed to Seesmic desktop. And myspace feed of course. - Jcm Manuel

Loic says they were waiting for FriendFeed's new API to work on FriendFeed support. I'd expect that's coming soon now. - Robert Scoble

ok that's great anyway. I find it strange though that myspace is so often ignored - that's 250 million people as well. Seesmic, Flock... etc. they don't seem to care a lot. - Jcm Manuel

This is the exact reason why the number one new feature Twitter needs is user groups. With user groups you can manage the information and pay attention to what is important. I find it surprising and actually ridiculous that they haven't been able to implement this feature yet. Scoble is right about not investing time in Twitter clients to create user groups; the innovation in this field is so rapid that you can easily end up wasting time. It's the exact reason why I haven't created user groups on Seesmic or Tweetdeck - Angus Burton

I do the same thing. My second account I call the "PIMP" group, People I've Met Personally. Two accounts is better than Tweetdeck groups because I don't like to be stuck in tweetdeck. - Scott Jangro

for me, Twitter is biz, Friendfeed can serve as both personal and biz. Originally, my 1 twitter account was meant 2 be personal, but now its more than that, its 4 advocacy and social purpose. Therefore I find if I want anything personal, friendfeed and identi.ca would be better serve 4 me! - polou/indigo_bow

I've said it several times in several places, and again here just to hear myself ramble. Tweetdeck misses tweets very often. I've created columns/groups/whatever you wanna call it to follow family and friends. It misses their stuff more than it catches it. So, for me, and several other people I know, it's unreliable... and therefore unusable. I'm not too keen on using Peoplebrowsr or another web based solution at the moment. They just don't "feel" right to me... yet. But I'm sure it's coming. In the meantime, I'd say Scoble has the right idea with more than one account. - John

I have 3 twitter accounts and manage a friendfeed & twitter account for someone else, so that makes 4 twitters and 2 friendfeeds I have to keep my eyes on. - April

@April u r one busy person! - polou/indigo_bow

I have opened a second twitter account to stream there most of my links I feel like to (re)share w/o comments, and reserve the "main" account for more "conversation-like" stuff. Not sure yet if it will work, I am still experimenting. I also realized that I can use that second account to filter my twitter feed when I am mobile (follow real people on one account and news sources on another, for example...) - Ashalynd

I usually find that interesting things I find on Twitter already has been filtered through to Friendfeed, so I have to say I care less and less about checking Twitter - Asgeir

Just suspending my experimental automated one. Apparently A LOT of people don't dig that :) The TOP SECRET address is ..... - Charlie Anzman

All of this just so you can get DMs on Twitter? Your email address (and your cell phone number) are right on your blog. Do you have so little faith in email? Or do you want to force people into 140 character messages, so you get less lengthy emails? By creating convoluted systems, you haven't solved anything. You're not addressing an obsessive need to be in touch with everyone through every means possible at all costs so you don't miss out on ever morsel of information because it might just turn out to be important. - Joost Schuur