There are so many of them, if the activity weren’t so common, I’d be scared. I’m talking about people “following” me on Twitter.
I’ve just logged in and posted a twitter (I can’t bring myself to call them tweets), the first since mid-November. And yet since then, I’ve still had 6 or 7 people I don’t know start following me. What’s the deal? I don’t have a problem with it – if I did, I wouldn’t have a Twitter account. But I don’t understand it, either. On Twitter, I follow people that I know from other networks (mostly 9rules), and I don’t feel a great urge to follow hundreds of random people that I’ve never spoken to or emailed before. Do these people who are following me (and hundreds of other people – I’ve looked!) really care about what I post to Twitter? Or is it just a collection game?
I feel like I’m just an item on their page, as if they’re collecting bottle caps or stamps. I felt the same way on MySpace (which I no longer use) and Facebook (which I log into about once a month). It seems that the collecting of friends and faces is more important than actually communicating and forming relationships with the people.
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Actually it’s the same in MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog too. Quite tiring. I’ve even deleted my stuff at Facebook.
It’s clearly a collection and “see me” game. I’ve added many at those two sites above, but with Twitter I plan to be more restricted.
Twitter I find useful and fun in another way, so I’ll keep that one for a while at least. Can come in handy when I’m out traveling maybe
Posted 07 Jan 2008 at 3:31 pm ¶Yeah. Basically I think the motivation is publicity. Most of the strangers who’ve followed me I’ve noticed have a blog or some kind of site.
Posted 08 Jan 2008 at 9:28 am ¶@Lifecruiser: I’m still enjoying Twitter, but only because I’ve stuck to following people I know at least vaguely.
I was not aware that you ever *stopped* traveling.
@Hrafn: That’s a good point; I’d say at least some of the people that are followed look at the follower’s profile and, potentially, their website. It’s a poor way to get my attention, though; I just ignore them.
Posted 08 Jan 2008 at 11:13 am ¶Well, you know my thoughts on Twitter I suppose. I also follow everyone back who follows me – bar spammers, twerps and collectors, like you seem to be getting a lot of.
I take one look at their following/followers rate, check out their URL and sometimes the site itself, then decide whether to follow. People who ‘do’ something are in, the rest I just ignore, with ease.
I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this when Twitter hits the one million user mark (prolly somewhere in early spring of 08) and I hope Twitter is ready for the sheer mass of late adopters who think they can exploit it. That is: offer more tools for checking out relationships, who knows who, why are these people following me.
I’m glad you’re back though and hope to see you around. Twitter is the first social tool without any real goal that has actually turned into a social tool for me that I do use – to network, tag things, get news, follow events. Quite amazing really.
Posted 08 Jan 2008 at 4:59 pm ¶Nils: Yeah, some more tools would be nice. One I’d really like to see is a sort filter for followers, based on whether or not they’re active. I just checked out all of the people following me who I’m not following, and a large number of them haven’t posted anything for months – I’m assuming they haven’t logged in at all.
I agree – all of the other social tools, MySpace, Facebook, etc. etc., it never really interested me much. While I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t live without Twitter, it does make for some quick fun. Nice to know what the people I dig are doing around the world, even if what they’re doing is relatively unimportant.
Posted 09 Jan 2008 at 11:46 pm ¶Josh, does this mean I can’t follow you?
I’ve been wondering the same about random Twitter followers of mine … wonder how many you’ve gotten since you first wrote this post! One pleasant “random” Twitter follower was Anderson Cooper, however.
I gladly followed him back. In general, I tend to be actually flattered when I see the number they follow is few. I analyze on a case-by-case basis.
Posted 18 Jan 2008 at 7:00 pm ¶Esther: No, you certainly can.
I’ve gotten a couple new random followers, one today, actually. I looked; they were following 500 some folks, and were being followed by around 40.
Since posting this and reading the stuff you all have said, I’ve been trying to be a bit more open minded about it, checking out each new unknown follower individually. Alas, I’ve not had one yet that I’m interested in following.
Posted 18 Jan 2008 at 7:58 pm ¶Post a Comment