Sean’s Digs

Are they really following you?

I have been on twitter for a about a year and a half, active for about 8 months or so. For those who don’t know what Twitter is, here is the wikipedia article. Anyway, I have been thinking about followers. The people I follow usually tend to fall into one of three groups. Group one is the people that I know - friends and family. Group two are what I call gurus. They may be famous or not, but I find what what they say to be interesting. Mostly I already know about them from blogs or something. The third group is the random people that follow me. I don’t follow people that are clearly spammers, but otherwise if someone follows me I tend to follow them back, to see if they have anything interesting to say.

One day (actually twice) someone from the third group made the statement that he was unfollowing people that were not following him. He said “I hate to do it, but I have to.” This started me thinking about twitter followers. Clearly he was much more concerned than I was! Another time I was listening to the Stack Overflow podcast, by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Joel mentioned that someone (I forget who, If I remember I will put it in) had said “Joel Spolsky has a follow to follower ration of 1 to 1000 [meaning he has 1000 followers for every person that he is following]. So twitter is a broadcast platform?” He told Jeff that he didn’t really understand what the guy was getting at. Jeff told him that the guy was calling him a jerk for not following all those people that were following him.

Wait a second. Joel has 10k followers. There is no way he could follow that many people. Well, not read the tweets. Let’s say that each person tweeted once every 10 days. By my calculation that is…let’s see…carry the one…1000 tweets a day! Joel is supposed to read 1000 tweets a day from people he doesn’t know? Come on, that is preposterous.

But wait. Another person I follow is Michael Hyatt. He was over 30k followers, and he is following over 30k people! How does he find time to do that, and blog, and be the CEO of a publishing company, and an author! He must not sleep! Except he does - at least according to his tweets. So what is going on?

Well, even though Michael Hyatt is one of my followers on Twitter, I don’t think he is really following me. Michael has blogged before about how to manage your twitter followers. He uses an application to do this. One feature is the ability to divide the people you follow into “groups.” The trick is to put people into groups based on weather or not you care about what they say(I am simplifying - go read his post). I am probably in the don’t care group. Once the 29, 950 or don’t cares are filtered out, it is much easier to read the tweets of the 50 or so people you do care about. Which means that, as I said above, he isn’t really following me.

Not that that hurts my feelings. I am following him because I care about what he says. He has no reason to care about what I have to say. Evidently ‘tho some people would be hurt. Which I think is rediculous. Why should my following someone create an obligation that they should follow me? That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Maybe it is polite to follow people when they follow you. But don’t get bent out of shape if people don’t follow you back. Why are you following these people anyway? Is it simply to get a higher follower count? That’s a little sketchy, I think. If someone you care about doesn’t follow you back, suck it up. If somone you don’t care about doesn’t follow you back, why are you following them in the first place?

So, are the people following you on twitter really following? Looks to me like not as much as you think.

Posted in: Society, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Society, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.