The Jury came back on the Twitter case

My Twitter account is called Number1PI. Sherlock Investigations was too long. On Thanksgiving I had 82 followers on Twitter. Two months later I have 306. But don't cheer yet. It took me many hours to gain those followers.

I remember approaching 200 followers. Every time I reached 199, some would unfollow me. It took about a week to break the barrier at 200.

Some people make it their goal to have a lot of followers. They actually say, "If you follow me, I'll follow you." So, a person has, say, 1,200 followers, and they're following 1,200 people. The more people you do that with the more tweets you get every day. Currently, I'm following about 479, and I receive about 2,000 tweets a day. Who has time to read all that? Can you imagine your tweets lost in this mess?

If you're a popular person, or a news organization, you'll get a lot of followers, and you don't have to follow anyone in return. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say, and you'll be the first to get breaking news.

A lot of people try to sell things on Twitter. All kinds of things. I've had several hookers try to follow me and I blocked them. Sometimes Twitter catches them first.

Twitter is great for breaking news. No longer do you have to wait until 6 o'clock or your morning paper to arrive to get the news. I think getting the news so fast makes us a very anxious society.

The bottom line, unless you're very well-known, Twitter is useless to sell anything or promote something. If you want to follow people just to get their perspective, fine.