I know there are a lot of people who will disagree with me on this and if you're one of them then I sincerely ask you to explain to me how I'm wrong...

Twitter is being touted as a powerful tool for helping people get information out there. I agree with this if we are talking about a band or a sports team tweeting to the masses as a one-way line of communication. I mean it's great that Taylor Swift wants to keep her fans in the loop on what she's doing and there are 3,265,000 fans that are glued to every word. Do you really think Taylor could keep up with what those 3 million people are tweeting back to her? I don't think so.

So the question becomes just how many people can you have as friends on Twitter (where you follow them and they follow you) and not have it become just noise? My guess is somewhere in the 200-300 range and less if you have a lot of active tweeters. For our show we have set up a Twitter account @commonsenseshow and currently have 788 followers and are following 727. The other day I left the page open as I went to dinner, came back two hours later and there were thousands of new tweets. Sorry, just don't have the time to read that many tweets!

So I asked myself, at any given time how many people are REALLY paying attention to what you say. I asked a question about if people really feel ok with fellow Twitter users using automated systems to send tweets. Out of our 788 followers I go zero response to this.

So I decided to try again, this time asking if people REALLY believe Twitter is a two-way street of communication to reply to me with the word "yes." After 24 hours we received two yes responses. One from Dana (@sparkey999w) and one from Lynn (@jetts424). Thank you for the responses ladies, but I think I've proven the point the other way.

The only way for Twitter to be a two-way street is if everyone follows a very small number of people, and that just isn't going to work. These folks that follow thousands or tens of thousands of people and pretend they can read what's out there is laughable at best. Sure, you can sometimes get their attention with a direct message or @reply but what's the point of that? E-Mail serves a better purpose at that point.

If you want people to follow you and have that number really MEAN something and translate to some kind of result your best bet is to get followers who follow very few people, that's the only way your message is going to stand out. Having a huge list of followers who don't read your message does nothing for you at all except it might make you feel cool because you have a large number of mostly empty, meaningless followers.

I'm sorry, but I see Twitter as an overall #Fail! for two-way communications. Am I wrong?