For a while after I signed up with Twitter I managed to remember it about once a week but now that I’m following a couple of people who “tweet” regularly I’ve been checking it once or twice a day and posting something, not everyday but more often than I did at first. I would like to follow just a few more people but not too many or else I might waste all my time checking Twitter.
I got seven new followers today. Up until today I had a total of ten including spammers that I blocked. Of today’s new followers only one was definitely spam and a couple were sort of borderline. They post a lot of what looks legitimate but every few updates will be an advertisement. The others I’m really curious as to why they chose to follow me because none of them are the kind of people I would be interested in following. A lot of their updates were offensive and just the overall style is off-putting. I don’t know the etiquette regarding blocking. I don’t have to follow them so I don’t have to see any of their updates so it doesn’t really hurt me that they’re following me. It almost seems rude to block them but at the same time I’m not sure I want those people in my list of followers.
About spelling – being limited to only 140 characters I can accept abbreviations and acronyms and since some people are updating from their phones I can even accept all lower case. But since you’re limited to only 140 characters why on Earth would you use the word “and” when the correct word is “an”?
And one more thing – why do we use “tweet” as the verb when “twitter” itself is a perfectly acceptable verb? I don’t want to tweet I want to twitter. Tweeting sounds like something a little bit annoying. Twittering sounds… I don’t know… not annoying… like background noise I guess.
July 21st, 2009 - 9:47 pm
I don’t entirely understand the big deal about Twitter, but lately I’ve been using it more and more. One thing that makes me jealous is the way some people have hundreds of follower, I’ve got just five or six not counting spammers and can’t figure out how to get more.
July 22nd, 2009 - 6:04 am
I know what you mean. It seems like no matter what I do I’m doomed to be ignored. Maybe that’s because only the smartest people understand me.
July 22nd, 2009 - 6:14 am
I’ve concluded that the only “etiquette” to blocking is that someone who actually knew you might be hurt if you blocked them. Anyone who looks like spam to me, they get blocked. I “block” pretty ruthlessly if the person feels like a spammer. I’ve gotten a few really skeevy people following me….women whose avatar shows them with as few clothes on as (I presume) Twitter allows, and who make references to webcams and things that might be euphemisms for parts of their anatomy. (So they instantly get blocked.)
I think some people start “following” all the people that someone else they like/know “follows.” That’s not really spam, but I wonder if those people even necessarily care about the Twitter streams of all the people they follow.
I’m not quite sure the benefit to the spam followers. Maybe some of them get paid based on the number of people they claim to follow (in which case, I will gleefully block). Maybe they’re just hoping someone will click on their spammy/scammy links.
July 22nd, 2009 - 9:04 am
I threw out a comment about OpenDNS about three days in, and several hours later OpenDNS was following me. Ditto with Levi Johnston, Bristol Palin’s ex. Some people, I assume, have to know what’s being said about them or they’ll feel forever unfulfilled. (They’re still on my list.)
Second weekend in, I purged about 25 names from the list; most of them came back. I left them alone, except for the obvious smut peddlers, who were duly excised.
One woman who wailed on Yahoo! that she couldn’t get any followers, I decided to follow. Shortly thereafter, she signed up with several Get More Followers! operations and spread their stuff over the place; I drop her and pick her back up again depending on her signal-to-noise ratio.
There is a tool called FriendOrFollow which analyzes your list and gives you back a list of everyone whom you are following but is not following you. I have about 50 on my list.
Anyone on my blogroll, should I discover a Twitter presence, will be duly followed: this is a rule. The willingness of some of them to reciprocate probably explains my current count in the 170s: I have rather a large blogroll, though nothing as huge as Lynn’s Links page.
July 22nd, 2009 - 9:12 am
I haven’t been trying at all to get more followers on Twitter. It’s of rather low importance to me. I was just lamenting my general lack of popularity on everything. Twitter is just one more thing. It’s the same in realspace. Most people just don’t find me all that interesting I guess.
July 22nd, 2009 - 9:46 am
Eh, I’m fast coming to conclude that not only is popularity not a clear marker of quality, in some cases popularity may suggest lower quality, in the sense of having to be “commercial.”
I guess I wish more people I considered friends or considered to be interesting were on Twitter so I could follow them. As for followers, I guess I’d rather have a few people who kind of “knew” me and cared about me than people who were obsessively checking for mentions of themselves.
It’s actually kind of disappointing to me to find someone following me and realizing that they’re only doing it because I mentioned something they’re trying to sell. I got a person pushing reel mowers following me after a mower comment; I got some guy calling himself “The Great Cornholio” following me after I made a Beavis and Butthead joke.
The internet is nothing if not strange. I’m glad we don’t have actual “followers” in real life; a whole Katamari ball of people rolling around after you on the street because you happened to mention some certain thing.