So I thought I had a pretty good system in place with twitter where the only notifications I received on my phone were people in X mile radius of me at any given time. It was a little more complicated than that honestly but that was the ideal end result. The idea there being that when I had time I could catch up on the web with all of my other friends, but people I actually had the chance of running into in person I'd know right what they were up to when ever they sent in a tweet. Initially this worked really well and I'd add/remove people based on what city I was in, or what cities they were in. I've been doing that since the conferences in March and April and while I'm currently still using that scheme I'm noticing a few good and bad side effects of it, unfortunately more bad than good. This is what I'm seeing-

Bad: The further I get away from email the less panic I feel every moment I haven't checked it. This is a good thing and the desired goal. But it seems twitter is more than happy to fill that void, and now when I get a twitter sms I feel compelled to check it right away to make sure I'm not missing anything. This is the worst side effect and could be the thing that makes me turn off notifications altogether, again.

Good: I'm definitely experiencing the "close personal network" or "rich presence" notion of knowing exactly where a handful of my friends are at any given moment. This is kind of cool and has definitely created, at leaat a perceived new connection to these people. Though not all of those people get notifications so it's one way for the most part.

Bad: Before twitter if I got an SMS it was from someone who was sending something directly to me, and that was nice. Someone is thinking about you, that kind of thing. When I started getting twitter SMS messages I was excited by the new slew of messages I was getting. I was still getting the personal SMS messages I'd gotten before but now mixed with public tweets as well. Now I'm definitely noticing a slight tinge of disappointment when I get a new SMS message when I see it's come from twitter and could have been intended for anyone rather than from a friend sent right to me.

That's just a few of the twitter effects I'm thinking about at the moment. I also think I need to adjust my rule about who I follow, as I'm finding following people just because they are local isn't very useful if I never hung out with those people to begin with, and likewise there are people not in LA who I'd rather be getting updates from. Still parsing a lot of thing, will update as I sort more through it.