March 31, 2009
Don’t be stupid with twitter
Given all the recent @cwalken nonsense, I found Dave Gorman’s reflections refreshingly unstupid:
I could choose to follow everyone who follows me. It might make some of them feel good in the short term. But surely it would be apparent that in such large numbers following is effectively meaningless… so it would be nothing more than a token, empty gesture… and what would the point of that be?
When I tried to explain that, some people got in touch and suggested that I could ‘follow’ everyone but use the filtering system of something like Tweetdeck to ferret out only the tweets from people I was actually interested in.
Which I think meant they were telling me they’d be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved.
The argument is that if I (or anyone else with a lot of followers) don’t follow loads of people back then it’s obvious that my use of Twitter is purely selfish and self-promotional. I think they’ve got that completely arse about tit. Twitter works in two ways. Obviously. 1) You send. 2) You receive.
If I follow so many people as to effectively make the receiving part unusable then I’m not being more interactive, I’m being less so because if receiving is rendered useless I’m effectively admitting that I’m only interested in using the send part of the equation. Wouldn’t giving 20,000 people an essentially meaningless pat on the back and the false sense of being followed actually be more self-promotional than using the service to find the things you want to find?
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So too true, as a fellow once said. You know, my modest number of (ahem!) followers doubled during the height of @cwalken mania. Kinda creeped me out.
Yeah, what he said.
Especially “I think they’ve got that completely arse about tit,” which it’s a new locution to me.