Even good programming people - such as Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack in the Windows/ .NET world - tend to post a lot of personal/ non programming stuff on twitter. I'd recommend choosing an RSS reader and following their blogs instead.

I follow these guys:

• Codinghorror ^[1]
• Scott Hanselman ^[2]
• Miguel de Icaza ^[3]
• SecretGeek ^[4]
• Rick Strahl ^[5]
• Phil Haack ^[6]

There is a comforting aspect in reading tweets of these people: you see that you're not the only one with seemingly trivial problems... ;-)

Edit: There is dvlprs.com ^[7], a site which shows live tweets from "celebrity" programmers.

Jurgen Appelo recently created this list: Top 50 Twitterers to Follow for Developers ^[1].

Now perhaps somebody could help me with my question, what exactly is the point of Twitter ^[2]?

A long-ish list of people I enjoy, in no particular order:

• Sam Stephenson ^[1], programmer at 37signals and creator of Prototype.
• Marco Arment ^[2], developer of Tumblr and Instapaper.
• Joe Hewitt ^[3], engineer at Facebook, developer of the Facebook iPhone app, and best-known for his work on Firefox.
• Dion Almaer ^[4], engineer at Mozilla and co-author of Ajaxian.
• Joe Stump ^[5], former tech lead at Digg.
• Francisco Tolmasky ^[6], founder of 280 North.
• Aza Raskin ^[7], head of UX at Mozilla Labs.
• Todd Ditchendorf ^[8], Mac software developer.
• John Resig ^[9], creator of jQuery.
• Jeff Cohen ^[10], Rails dev.
• Dustin Diaz ^[11], engineer at Twitter, and also a kick-ass photographer.
• Rands ^[12], engineer at Apple.
• Michael Tsai ^[13], Mac software developer.
• Daniel Jalkut ^[14], Mac software developer.
• Ian Hickson ^[15], author of the HTML 5 spec.

Jon Skeet ^[1]

It depends what you're looking for - if you're after .NET I've got a whole list of people I follow ^[1] - some 800 of them. I find that the most consistently useful people - forgetting the "celebrities" who are just on the list for their own sake, because they have podcasts or run some company or other. I find that the celebrities don't usually tweet much that's useful, most of them just talk amongst themselves about useless rubbish most of the time and never respond to you if you tweet them anyway - not to say they're not great people, but if you want high signal/noise ratio, follow their blogs. That said, there's a bunch of great people you could follow that will help, and not all of them are celebrities, but they're all great people and really know their stuff:

• @JonSkeet ^[2] is definitely one of the most helpful. Usually responds if you tweet to him. Microsoft MVP.
• @MladenPrajdic ^[3] is always good, not a "celebrity", but definitely a solid developer. Always seems to have an answer if you get stuck.
• @Cammerman ^[4] is solid. Great for theoretical debate.
• @LynnBeighley ^[5] - tech author, always responds when you tweet to her, she's awesome.
• @elijahmanor ^[6] - always posts stacks of really useful links.
• @mrpaladin ^[7] - like Elijah, always posts stacks of really interesting stuff. Although, if you follow both of these guys, you can kiss almost 100% of your time goodbye if you're not careful. The information's too interesting not to read, and there's too much to take it all in.
• @sbohlen ^[8] - Cofounder of ALT.NET, and contrary to the stereotype of ALT.NETters being jerks, he's a pretty nice guy. Microsoft MVP.
• @SyntaxC4 - Organizer of coffee & code in the GTA/Guelph region. Great guy, super helpful, Microsoft Azure guru.
• @ScottGu ^[9] - Doesn't post much at all, never responds to any of your tweets, but he's the big cheese for the .NET framework.
• @Scobleizer ^[10] - Robert Scoble, tech news. Tons of interesting material, he hasn't (so far) responded to any of my tweets, but he seems to engage with his followers. Perhaps he just thinks I'm an idiot :P

I've also got some lists set up:

• Tech Bloggers ^[11]
• Tech Authors & Publishers ^[12]
• MVPs ^[13]

I've got a heap more, but I'd be here all day. 99% of the people I follow are developers, so if you want more inspiration, just go and rip off the list of people I follow ;)

A really easy way to keep a tab on useful people to follow is to have a running search in something like TweetDeck. I've got a column set up for "asp.net" OR "vb.net" OR csharp OR "c-sharp" OR VisualStudio OR "Visual Studio" OR MSDN OR "VS2010" OR "VS2008" As you see people's names come up, if the information is consistently relevant, you can start following them.

And of course, in my mind, the absolute most important person to follow is me ^[14]. Don't crush my ego by not following me, my therapy bills are killing me already ;)

I twitter, mostly about my development of JUnitMax. My creatively named account: http://twitter.com/KentBeck

#followfriday :-)

@codemonkeyism ^[1] @codinghorror ^[2] @dnene ^[3] @elijahmanor ^[4] @gvanrossum ^[5] @jeffbarr ^[6] @jeffpatton ^[7] @jurgenappelo ^[8] @mfeathers ^[9] @robdiana ^[10] @shanselman ^[11] @spolsky ^[12] @testobsessed ^[13] @unclebobmartin ^[14]

This is not a complete list of programmers and software experts I follow, but they are all well known and I hope this list is helpful to you.

I think following these people on Twitter and following their blogs via RSS don't need to be mutually exclusive activities; they can complement each other nicely.

There is a list in this question ^[1].

This is a nice list from Jeff Moser ^[1]

another list from Elijah Manor http://webdevdotnet.blogspot.com/2008/12/20-people-net-developers-should-follow.html

If you're into graphics/game development and @ID_AA_Carmack ^[1] (John Carmack of id software fame) is a fascinating one to follow.

Most sites will have a twitter account or bot that posts links to their site when a new article is posted, some of these can be quite nice to follow. I even wrote a program to aggregate RSS feeds and then tweet when new articles arrived, case in point @stackalert.

100 technology experts on Twitter

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=22754

http://twitter.com/rockcoder/programmers