It's becoming apparent to me that many of the new friends and connections I've made through Twitter are being enhanced outside of Twitter. By this, I mean that if I've met you and established a connection or friendship with you via Twitter, I'll more likely continue to keep in touch with you using other means outside of following your standard Twitter stream.

Here are some ways I maintain relations with people I've met through Twitter:

• Twitter DM's
• Text messaging to their phone
• Email
• Facebook
• Their blog
• In-person

Notice this doesn't include "following their Twitter stream." I will still check that person's Twitter stream from time-to-time, but no longer do I need to see every single update, as it happens.

Once I get to know you, Twitter becomes less useful from a certain perspective. It may be because Twitter is a great way to get to know someone initially, since you can follow what they do on an hour-by-hour basis. Once I really get to know people, and have met them in-person - I stop caring so much about their hour-by-hour updates, and instead touch base using other, more personal, means.

This is not to say I don't care for your hour-by-hour status updates - I just can't keep up with the influx of noise and still keep my day job. I'd rather touch base every few days or weeks - enough to stay involved in people's lives, but not as much to completely eat all my time away.

So, in a way, Twitter acts as my "social relations base," where I find new people to network with, then after I get to know them a bit, I only use Twitter as a means to direct message.

Often I'll have an idea that I'd like to share with someone, which I'll just DM to them directly, rather than @ reply, or posting it on Twitter and hoping they see it. Often times I have to remember to check their Twitter stream first, because I've mentioned things to someone privately, then realized they had just publicly tweeted the same thing. Then they ask, "Don't you follow my tweets?"

I think everyone using Twitter can recognize this approach. We all have our favorite Twitter users, who we follow more closely. But don't even sit there and tell me that you intimately follow each of your 150+ Twitter users hour-by-hour updates. There's absolutely no way, unless you sat on a beach all day and did nothing but follow tweets.

At a certain point, you reach a maximum threshold, where the amount of updates coming in defeats any sense of comprehending it all. So you shut off notifications, or trim your notification alerts to only a few close friends, and eventually we all end up in the same spot.