Similarly, don't be offended if someone un-follows you or chooses not to follow you back. Boyd says he'll stop following someone, for instance, who keeps tweeting things for a few days (such as from a conference) that don't capture his interest. He'll begin following the person again after that event is over.

Unlike a cocktail party, however, where the attendees aren't journalists with recorders and notepads, Twitter is a publishing medium where your messages will ring with finality to a lot of people. Because a tweet must be 140 characters or less, context can be easily misunderstood. Also, don't assume that people who are your immediate followers will only see your tweets. A tweet can be picked up publicly by or .

"It's open social discourse," Boyd says. "As a result, to some extent, some of what you say is going to be available for the public to see."

One complaint often voiced in the Twitter community concerns people who tweet too frequently, dominating users' homepages with their messages. Again, you can avoid this by examining a person's profile page before you sign up to follow him. If you don't want to follow the person, don't get mad at them for tweeting in volume .

Also, if you're just getting started, it's not recommended that you start following the more celebrity accounts or power Twitter users who tweet a lot, says Laura Fitton ( ), who runs , which advices businesses on how to utilize Twitter. "They'll dominate your stream," Fitton says, whose Pistachio account has more than 18,000 followers. "I say follow me on RSS instead, which is an option on Twitter."