Followers vs Friends, Popularity vs Privacy

It's been said that Twitter followers are followers and not necessarily friends, but does that make it any less creepy when complete strangers start following you? Many Twitter etiquette guidelines say it's pefectly fine to follow and be followed by strangers, but I'm inclined to believe there's more to it.
Some Twitters like news feeds, companies, or celebrities are meant to be followed by strangers, and follow an informational-broadcast type update pattern. Just the opposite, some people update everything that they're doing on a deeply personal level, updates that are only meant to be seen by friends and sometimes these tweets are locked to strangers. Then we come to the ambiguous middle. (Which I admittedly fall into.) Being a writer, I don't mind when people read what I write, and I look at twitter with this perspective. My updates are semi-personal, sometimes containing entertaining links, and are written so that followers and friends alike will enjoy them. That's not to say I'm one of those people that tries to get a large amount of followers; I try and settle at a happy medium of updating about my thoughts for whoever wants to read them. However, I can see why Twitter accounts with thousands of followers would change their content to provide entertaining content for everyone instead of super personal entries. But how much is the content driven by the amount of followers, and how is the amount of followers effected by the type of content posted? (As far as regular people and not celebs or companies.)

Let's take a quick look.
According to Twitterholic, Kevin Rose is the number 10 most followed person on Twitter, understandably upstaged by Brittany Spears, Barrack Obama, CNN, New York Times, Etc.
Rose's tweets range from providing links and info "excited to get my sonos music working - just downloaded the iphone app, demo here: http://sonos.com/demo/iphon..." to more personal "back in the office (after 2 day move to new apt in SF) tons to do.. email count: 720," content not so different then my own, or most other people's. So why does he have 231,487 followers?

For starters, he's founder of social news site Digg.com. He has a website, a blog, and an active life on the many social networks of the web. While the content might not be so different than most people's, the exposure via linking to his Twitter page from many already popular other sites certainly is. Does he think it's creepy that 230 thousand complete strangers are following him? Probably not. You control the exposure(to a degree) of your twitter page and the content relevance to strangers.

There is one more aspect mentioning that pertains to how and why strangers find your Twitter page in the first place. With more and more tweet searching sites such as Tweetgrid and Twitter Search becoming popular, the chances of someone seeing your tweets if you're talking about a hot topic are substantially increased.

So good luck at becoming the next big Twitter celeb, or keeping those strange strangers from following your every update. Whichever you prefer.

-Presto