Yes, people will often follow you, expecting you to follow them ... but if they follow you, nothing bad happens. There are a few porn ones that are obvious and I block them, but otherwise, I follow about 450 people at the moment and about 350 follow me. Many are friends and related to my business, but there are also loads who are simply funny and often link to articles or things that are amusing and I love design and hand-made articles and probably follow about 50 designers and design bloggers.
Twitter.com is not a great way to follow lots of people - it just gets too confusing, so I use TweetDeck and group the people I follow into columns. My friends go into one, another column for replies to things I've said and those that mention me (often on Follow Fridays - people suggest other people to follow), then a wedding one, one for some of the columnists and so on. If I'm busy, I just look at about two columns. I look at more of them when I'm on the move via my iphone through Tweetie or TweetDeck applications. If you and another tweeter are both following each other, you can also direct message each other - it's like a FB private message.
Some people block their updates from being public, often when they have two Twitter IDs - a business one and a personal one. But most of the time, tweets are available for the world to see. And if you use TweetDeck, you can link your FB account and update both at the same time.
The nice thing about Twitter is its slightly random nature and openess. I've been following @cesarmillan, the dog whisperer. He's now following me ... along with 56000 others and has about 60 000 followers. Twitter has also led to me meeting a wedding co-ordinator and I have ended up meeting friends when I've known they're out and I'm in the area. A wedding tweeter today also asked for recipe ideas for high protein soups. We've never met and probably never will, but I suggested a few kinds and she went off thinking about bacon and split peas. There's a kind of community-ness and interactivity about it. FB is really an online reflection of your offline world; Twitter is more like swirling seas of communication that you can join in or not, each with a slightly different mix - and you join the mixes you're interested in.
It's also amazing for breaking news. It's how I found out Michael Jackson had died and how many people had objected to the Daily Mail's Jan Moir story. If I want to know who won Strictly, search for SCD and there will be updates as it happens.
Hope that makes things more clear.
And do let us know what your twitter id is!
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