Random Twitterings

Twitter is kind of an interesting phenomenon. People telling the rest of the world what they're doing in 140 characters or less.

It also appears to me to be a bit of a power play on the part of some folks. For the uninitiated, Twitter users "follow" updates (or "Tweets") from other people they choose, and they have "followers" who follow their tweets. I'm currently following 44 users, and have 310 followers. The follower number fluctuates every day in part because some new people decide to follow me, and some other decide to stop. The motivations for each are never clear.

One thing I've noticed is there are a lot of people who purport to know how to help you get new followers. Apparently their number one piece of advice is to go and follow lots of other people and maybe they'll follow you back. It all seems kind of shallow.

The 44 people I'm following I chose because I'm interested in what they're posting. A few are friends, but most I follow because the information they post could be useful to HolyCoast.com. People like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, Jim Geraghty, Mark Knoller, Jake Tapper and others often post things which help me find information for new blog posts. A couple like James Lileks and Roland Hedley are funny.

And living in Southern California, I also follow the USGS California earthquake site which broadcasts preliminary magnitudes and locations of earthquakes in California. While sitting in the rubble I might be the first one to know how big the earthquake was that destroyed my city.

I've never followed anyone just because I want them to follow me, and I'm apparently in the minority. Back when I first got on Twitter I had a guy in Texas follow me. Fine, the more the merrier. About two weeks later I got a somewhat angry email from the guy who reminded me that he followed me and why hadn't I followed him back? I didn't want to insult the guy, but I wasn't going to follow him just because he complained. I follow people I'm interested in.

I wrote him back and told him as gently as I could that I limited the people I follow so I wouldn't get lost in a sea of tweets, most of which wouldn't be of any value. Of course, that didn't placate him and as soon as he read my note he "unfollowed".

I've noticed lately that my follower number will go up by 6 or 8 every day, then drop by 2 or 3, and I know what's happening. Every time somebody follows me I get an email, and I then go and look at that persons Twitter profile. If the number of people they're following is nearly the same as their number of followers, I know exactly what they're doing. They followed me in hopes that I will follow them in return. In a day or so when I don't reciprocate they'll unfollow and go after somebody else.

Like I said, it's kind of shallow. Those people are successfully building up their numbers, but for what purpose? They just want to have lots of followers so they can feel important.

I've got better things to do.

By the way, if you want to follow the updates as they're posted, feel free to follow here.