Do you need a strategy for friends on Twitter?

When I started using Twitter I believed the hype.
Everyone is using it.
You just log on and search on your interests and you will find a huge wide circle of friends without doing anything much.

But that's not the reality I found.

If we exclude the celebrity gossip then probably 80% of the traffic seems to be from people and organizations trying to sell something and a huge proportion of the followers are coming from bots that are linked to the organizations that are trying to sell something.

So there are a huge number of tweets and tweeters the vast majority of which are just noise.

Sounds dreadful, but it isn't as bad as that.

A fair proportion of the automated following (i.e. I mention a keyword and someone starts following) are from people I would have wanted to follow.

Some of the best (professional) contacts I've got so far have been people I've come across through meetings, magazines articles, Linked-In and then starting following them and checking out who they are following.

So where does this leave me?

The random way I have identified people to follow gives me a mostly useful stream, but not as wide as might be ideally.

Equally increasing the number I follow into the thousands would give a lot of noise and swamp the whole process.

I'm planning to start a new strategy for 2010, I'll do much wider hunts for contacts and store them in lists (and also checking out the lists of people I follow) and review the lists on a periodic basis to find the best of the lists and start following them.

Any other suggestions?