This morning, with the unread emails in my mailbox falling below 400, with all of the emails that have come in since last Wednesday at least read, if not responded to, I figured I could take a few moments out to explore twitter a little more.

Some of this was because each morning I go through the half dozen or so new people that are following me on Twitter. In most cases, they are the Twitter Spammers. ‘SEO experts’ that are following 2437 people and six people are following them.

I’m currently followed by around 500 people and I follow around 300. It feels like a manageable crowd. When I am at home, I receive my tweets via Second Life, which I normally have open as a fancy IM client and screen saver on my number two computer. If TwitterBox is down in Second Life, I check recent twitters on the web. When I’m away from my computer for an extended period I turn on following on my cell phone. My pattern for sending tweets is similar, although I also send many tweets through Twitter feed, every time I update my blog.

Two tools that I played with today for exploring Twitter more deeply are Twubble and TwitterLocal. Twubble searches your friends and finds people who are friends of many of your friends. The big names in online social networks typically show up. Everyone has added folks like jasoncalacanis, davewiner, scobleizer to their friends list. Each time I run Twubble, I find another half dozen people that I should start following.

Over at TwitterLocal, I check to see who is saying what in my neighborhood. I live in a suburban area, so I’m looking at everyone who lives within 10 miles of my zipcode. I did stumble across one person in a neighboring town that I will probably start following once he returns on my radar.

Enough playing with Twitter, on to other tasks for the day.