To keep focus and priceless time from being wasted, one needs to take some precautions. Below find some of my suggestions and feel free to add your ideas in comments:

1. Keep the number of friends low if you want to keep up with the flow.
2. Don’t auto-follow. This is what spammers like.
3. Don’t follow everyone following you. Hand-pick those people that interest you.
4. Don’t follow out of politeness.
5. Don’t follow only to be followed. Don’t keep score.
6. Unfollow people that spam or irritate you. Don’t reward them.
7. Check out your new follower’s bio page.
8. Check their posts.
9. Check their friend, follower and update counts. Check the followers/friends ratio. Set a threshold value for yourself to follow.
10. Check their webpages. Most out-of-the-blue followers are spammers, marketers, etc.
11. Use a grouping/filtering client like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop or Nambu if you have to follow everyone.
12. Arrange your friends to groups like friends, VIP, interesting etc. using these clients.
13. Occasionally use Twitter Karma to bulk unfollow peoplethat doesn’t interest you anymore.
14. Occasionally use Twitoria to remove those that are not active anymore.
15. Use services like wefollow to find interesting people. Do not rely on luck to find them.
16. Search your username using a preset search on your client. See what people are saying about you.
17. Create searches for things that interest you, sites you maintain, things you love. Feel the twitter vibe.

Here is my take on the most essential 3rd-party iPhone Apps. Stock apps like Mail, iPod, Photos, Safari, and web shortcuts  do not count.

Facebook

If you use Facebook, than Facebook App is a must-have. It lets you easily navigate and socialize on the world’s most popular and fastest growing social network.

Nimbuzz (and Skype)

Since the days of ICQ, we have been IMing. And we have been IMing on multiple networks. Nimbuzz has a great user interface, works with most of the networks out there and it is free. Since I haven’t been able to get VOIP to work, you can assist it with Skype too.

Twitterfon

The twitter frenzy is on. You must be living an offline life if you haven’t heard of the web’s latest craze. Get online or talk to some nerds around you and go to twitter.com (don’t forget to follow me @alpayerturkmen). Twitterfon is the best free twitter client for the iPhone IMHO. If you are more into it, try the Retweet app to follow the most re-tweeted. The app was free when I grabbed it, but may be paid at the momen

Wapedia

Oooh, the sweet satisfaction of reaching the information – fast. Wikiamo, Quickpedia and Wapedia are some of the apps that let you quickly and easily wander around Wikipedia. Wapedia, of all those three has the best looking and performing GUI.

Stanza (and Kindle)

Though not as full featured (in terms of functionality and screen size) as the Kindle, iPhone is a great place to read. Either grab great free titles accessible through Stanza, or use Kindle App for iPhone from Amazon.

Do you have more apps that you can’t live without? Please feel free to comment.

So you are on twitter for a while. Like me… You are enthusiastic about it. There are thousands and millions of people, sharing on what they call now the statusphere. You meet new people, you find those you already know. You find great ideas, funny sites, new insights.

One day you look up and see that the number of people you are following is so high that the number of tweets they send out is much much higher than you can keep up with it. Because you have followed back most people that follow you. You followed every person who wrote something you like. When you look at the tweets, you have no idea what they are talking about. Much worse, you don’t know who they are.

So you decide to unfollow those people, and they start to unfollow you. Is this a game? Is this a MMORPG where you come together with people to form clans and kill monsters?

I am sure twitter will (or already has) become something that we take for granted. But how will we use it? @scobleizer says that he follows everyone because he says he wants everybody to be able to send a direct message to him. While others (including me) say that you can’t follow even 100 average speed twits. So what do we do? Do we follow everyone, bi-directionally? Do we follow only those that matter to us?

What I think is that this will come to a hybrid solution as everything else. We will use a tool, something like TweetDeck, to filter out the noise while keeping the communication channels open. I am quite surprised to see that TweetDeck is available today, to keep you sane.

What do you think?