Follow Friday (twitter thing)

by Christopher Flynn — Monday, December 21, 2009

So a lot of people have follow friday posts that list a bunch of names and not much else. I don't think these are particularly helpful as I have no idea why they are recommending them. I don't really have time to click on 20 names to read their posts and decide if I like them. A short summary of why I should follow them would be helpful. That's why I am going to start a follow friday series and I will post one person each Friday with a short blog post as to why I follow them and why I think they are worth looking at.

Now, if you don't make the list, well, sorry. I have had to unfollow a number of people for various reasons. Don't take it personal, I just don't have a lot of time. If I have unfollowed you, it's probably been for one of the following reasons...

Your posts (read more)... The whole idea of twitters 140 character limit is so you can be short and to the point. If most of your posts lead somewhere else for me to read it all, I won't bother and will unfollow you. It's ok to link to your blog with a teaser headline as long as I can get an idea of what I am going to read about. However if I need to click on something to see what your tweet is about, I'll probably unfollow you.

Tweeting too much. The worst with this in my experience was @GuyKawasakI who tweeted way too much. He also has 2 people besides himself tweeting on his account. He posted some really interesting things sometimes but there was also just a lot to go through. I think he tweeted more than all my other followers combined. I just don't have time to read them all.

A lot of posts on points of view that I disagree with. I've unfollowed a number of Atheist tweeters because of this. It seems a lot of them are very liberal. By that I mean pro-left bankruptcy in all its forms. Of course I've unfollowed pro-right warmongers for similar reasons. I'm ok with differing points of views but if it makes up about 90% of your posts, sorry, nothing personal, I just disagree with you and will unfollow you.

Again, I'm not going to talk about everyone on my tweet list, just those who are semi-active (ie if you have two posts a month you probably won't make the list) and typically touch on things I agree with. However, just because I recommend someone, does not mean I agree with them on everything. Just because I may like @donttrythis for what he does on mythbusters, does not mean I agree with his political views (and this applies to others, I'm just using him as an example). I just wanted to make that clear.

So starting tomorrow, I'll have my first follow friday post and I'll go until I run out of names. I may have a few after that if I find some other people to talk about though.