On twitter, the criteria or guidelines to use for choosing somebody to follow are to a certain degree, something very personal. Ultimately you decide what is worth your time to follow or to read up on.

If you don’t know where to start, I can give you a few suggestions.

1. Something you can do, is to do a search for a things that interest you using twitter search. You can start your search by visiting search.twitter.com and do a search in there for a subject that you are interested in.For example, if you’re into running, go to that url and type in running. After a few seconds you will get a result in real time of all the people that have typed the word “running” into a tweet. From the search results, you can click on people’s profiles and go see if they are actually talking about running for exercise or if they’re just talking about running around town, running errands or something along those lines.
2. Another great tool that you can use is something called monitter.com. On monitter, you get essentially three windows of search.twitter.com at the same time. This view allows you to look at different variations of the same phrase or 3 different phrases. So for instance continuing with the running theme, in one of the search fields you can type in “trail running” in another field you can type “road running,” and then the third window you can just type perhaps the name of your city.There’s a neat feature on monitter that lets you limit the search radius to a certain distance from a city. Look in the upper left hand corner for the tool. So for instance if you live in San Marcos California, and you don’t want to see results from San Marcos Texas, you can limit your search results in that fashion.
3. Something else you can do, is the old faithful method of asking your friends that are already on Twitter who you should follow.
4. Last but not least, is to follow your friend’s followers. There are no limits on who you can follow and who you cannot follow, at least no limits imposed by twitter. Some people have chosen to make their twitter stream private, so you need to ask them for permission and you may actually need to know them in order for them to give you access to their stream. Other than that there are no limitations on who you can follow.

Basically, you can pick whoever you want to follow based on whatever your interests are, and whatever you have the stomach to tolerate. Some people twitter a lot about a lot of different things, some people seldom twitter but are very specific about what they say. When it comes to who to follow, the choice is yours alone.