See according to me sites like twitter are only social sites and it acts on the bases of popularity. If you are a celebrity then you will definitely have millions of followers but it does not showing any democracy.
I think I should rephrase the question to include: Do you use twitter, do you understand it yet? The responses can't be properly analysed if people don't use it or understand it. I say that because I was there just a few weeks ago. Now I have used it and can see the benefits I have changed my opinions on it totally. I used to think they were all evil (probably because I don't understand them too). Twitter you don't have to use your real name so I wasn't afraid to jump in. Once I did I liked it so much I now use my real name so I can tweet official 'personal' tweets too, such as register my complaint with the PM, respond to each of their tweets openly and have a proper conversation with people.
I have just worked out why Republicans definately wouldn't think it possible. LoL I guess we might find out when Obama gets re-elected, or not. http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/barack-obama-twitter-10-million-followers_b13599
I don't use twiiter (to follow or post) or facebook (although I did make an account and friend my wife before I all but abandoned it) Too much noise. I'd rather go find something interesting to read. If something in twitter is newsworthy, I'll hear about it. (Like Rummy's tweet about the NYT)
That's a point to make mate.. I really believe that if I'd been twitting around, I wouldn't have known even half of the things that I know today. Not being addicted to social media gives me time to read about interesting stuffs..
I have 60k followers on Twitter and needless to say, I do not read what they write. At least not usually. Just something where I feed my blog into, so whenever I have something to write, I get traffic if the headline catches their interest. But since they have added the retweet feature where people's retweets do not long show up as @ mentions, I have been peaking here and there and once in a while people give me good feedback and new articles to pay attention to. Other than that, their lists have been working well for me. Just make sure the ones you follow are the ones who share some real information. Simply click on the list according to whatever topic you have categorized your followers under and it can be a great tool to keep up with what other researchers have discovered.
I was just gonna write similar. If you add just the people you want to hear from then it's very useful and quick to get the news you want. Plus of course, if you have 60,000 followers (I don't have that many) and you come up with good stories, people click the link and it's an instant 5-10 bucks from google. I'm working up to that. That's why buying followers is no good imho, you need real followers to make any money out of it. People who believe in your cause. ie: a sci-fi site has sci-fi followers so they can almost guarantee they get hits on their site from their regular readers.
See, there is a difference between you and me Mike.. You are a writer, you maintain a regular Blog. So you need to connect to your readers, twitter is an effective tool for you for that purpose.. I'm a programmer, I only need to communicate with my clients and that I do over phone, email and IM.. So twitter is not in my need list. And Whoa, 60K followers? Mike for president, I'd say...
You should know that even you can get huge followers today in Twitter with a spending small money.. So i don't find it anything will help the already rising country and people out there