{"id":566,"date":"2010-01-07T10:03:57","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T16:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000566"},"modified":"2010-01-07T10:03:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T16:03:57","slug":"why-are-you-following-me-on-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/566","title":{"rendered":"Why Are You Following Me on Twitter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Don&#8217;t you know that I&#8217;m a web developer posting geeky stuff and you&#8217;re a bar posting specials?<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I joined <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/mooreds\">the Twitter movement<\/a> a while ago (not a first mover by any means) but have been actively using it more in recent months.\u00a0 I find it useful as well as diverting.\u00a0 However, I don&#8217;t want to discuss how I use it right now; what I want to focus on is a behavior that interests me.<\/p>\n<p>It seems if I follow someone, mention anyone by name, or tweet on a topic of interest once, there&#8217;s a reflex for people to follow me.\u00a0 This doesn&#8217;t happen all the time, but happens often enough that it bears examining.\u00a0 Why would someone do this?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>if I posted once on a topic of interest, I might post again<\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s easier to follow and then unfollow than it is to read my twitterstream and see if I&#8217;m actually worth following<\/li>\n<li>I might follow someone who follows me, and followers are good<\/li>\n<li>Someone might know me (online or offline) and a tweet might have alerted them to my presence on twitter<\/li>\n<li>Someone might have seen my tweet, clicked through to <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/mooreds\">my profile<\/a>, and thence to my website, read a couple (or all :)) of my posts, considered whether or not I might have more of interest to say, and followed me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are the main reasons I can think of.\u00a0 Did I miss any? Oh, and the last couple are improbable, based on my web stats.<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s early in the Twitter game, especially for the pragmatists (Twitter having <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Crossing_the_Chasm\">crossed the chasm<\/a>), and it feels like the early days of my RSS reader (when I first discovered the wonderful world of blogs).\u00a0 Any time I stumbled upon a blog that had an interesting post, I added the blog&#8217;s feed to my RSS reader.\u00a0 Eventually, I was following hundreds of blogs.\u00a0 For a while, I kept up, reading the new posts diligently, but because of real life and work, I fell behind.\u00a0 Now, I rarely open Bloglines&#8211;I know which blogs I want to check out and just visit them directly.<\/p>\n<p>I think the same thing can happen to your twitter home page&#8211;if you add people indiscriminately (or even slightly discriminately) you risk polluting it and decreasing its value.\u00a0 Note that I don&#8217;t use any of the tools built around Twitter.\u00a0 They may help manage this issue&#8211;and I hope they do.<\/p>\n<p>Because it is so easy to follow people on Twitter (easier, in fact, than determining whether it would be worthwhile to follow them), it&#8217;s also easy to clutter up your experience.\u00a0 In the end, I believe this clutter will either drive you away from Twitter, or force you to spend time unfollowing (or, as Dion put it, <a href=\"http:\/\/almaer.com\/blog\/rebooting-your-social-network-when-is-it-time-and-how-can-you-garden\">&#8220;gardening&#8221;<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>[tags]twitter, crossing the chasm, social media[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don&#8217;t you know that I&#8217;m a web developer posting geeky stuff and you&#8217;re a bar posting specials? I joined the Twitter movement a while ago (not a first mover by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}