When I first joined Twitter, I could not imagine what it would be like to have 10,000 followers, or as I prefer to describe it, to have 10,000 people subscribe to my updates. (Jesus had followers. Twitter users have subscribers. It’s not the same thing.)

I got there honestly, and therefore, a lot more slowly than people who were better at amassing followers for the sake of numeric bragging rights. I never participated in any schemes to add followers, and in fact, did not participate in “Follow Friday” and came out strongly against what I saw as a pyramid scheme. When I was within a few hundred of 10,000, I offered a copy of my SocialCorp book to my 10,000th subscriber and a copy to a randomly selected person who tweeted about it, but by then I was certain to reach 10K any way. If you do the math on the cost of a couple of books, my 10,000th subscriber was really expensive.

When I signed up in June, 2007, Twitter, launched publicly in July, 2006, was less than a year old. Everyone was an early adopter. The conversations were engaging and stimulating. This has changed, and it’s partly my fault for following people whose tweets do not interest me, or in some cases, offend me.

It’s time to review my criteria for following/following back people on Twitter. Way back when (sounding like a wagon master on the Oregon Trail), I actively sought people in two distinct categories — friends and present/former colleagues, and people in allied fields, like public relations, social media, corporate communications, writing and publishing. As I spent time on Twitter, observing early adopters and the triumphs and missteps of the first businesses using Twitter as a communications tool, I became very well informed in these areas, and was often quite amused. As new users joined Twitter, many of them gravitated to me and the other one million or so people who were already there. So much of the early communications on Twitter involved discussions like “What is Twitter?” “Is it for real?” “How does a business use Twitter?” “What a waste of time!” and “What’s the etiquette here?”

Somewhere along the line, that all changed, and now about 25 percent of my new followers are multi-level marketers (MLMers), spammers, people actively trying to sell me goods and services, pornographers, and “make $3000 a minute while you sleep” hucksters. At the same time, Twitter grew from well under a million users to around 20 million today.

My original followers policy was to follow people in the categories I’ve described who interested me, people who came to my attention through an interesting article or presentation; and people I met at conferences and on panel discussions. I also looked for people who lived in my area, rural Santa Cruz County. I would follow back any new follower who appeared to be a “real” person and not a spam or porn account, or some kind of bot.

My online conversational style is to engage with anyone interesting. I don’t segregate by political affiliation, religion, profession, gender, etc. While this is an inclusive policy, it has led to too much noise in my Twitter experience. My inclusive policies regarding political discussion, for example, which once allowed me to see many sides to a political issue, have now subjected me to fringe discussions which are often hateful and offensive.

And I know I’ll get a bunch of grief for revealing this, but I don’t really care for pets. And I don’t have any. But I have early Twitter friends who have pets. (This is like saying I know people who wear shoes.) Others who have come along have observed that I have pet lovers as followers and have assumed I am one, too. But I am not. So people who sell/market to pet owners target me, and they couldn’t be further off their demographic.

I forged some great friendships during those early times, and had my brushes with celebrity, like many Twitter users have. It was great watching Comcast, Dell, Ford, and others as they joined Twitter and began to use it seriously. Recently, for example,  I noticed someone tweeting about their enthusiasm for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I replied that they should follow @kfc_colonel, the official Twitter account for KFC. @kfc_colonel replied to me “Joel, you’re the Colonel’s guy. You were there when we had more herbs & spices than we had followers. Thanks!” It’s nice to have a personal connection with a company. I’ve had the chance on Twitter to “talk” to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, MC Hammer, and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. Alyssa Milano even sent me a direct message! (I sleep with it under my pillow.)

So Twitter is what I make of it. And it’s sort of cool to have 10,000 subscribers, but the number of followers I have is not as important as who they are and how I interact with them. And that’s up to me. Anyone who says “Twitter sucks, there are too many spammers,” or “Ashton Kutcher ruined Twitter,” can easily take back control of their Twitter existence. That’s what I’m trying to do.