There are weird goings on in the land of twitter.
In particular, it seems that recently every man and his dog has started following me. Now I’m not going to get excited and think they know something I don’t – or worry that “those photos” have been published in some dodgy tabloid somewhere.
Instead, it appears to be some sort of twitter trend at the moment, around people trying to have more followers than Obama or Stephen Fry. There seems to be an expectation that if someone follows you, you follow them back. And hence the number of followers they have grows. Why?
Maybe its seen as some sort of online badge of credibility or success. “I have thousands more twitter followers than you do”, and so on.
Anyway, so I’ve decided to take a stand. Initially I did the polite thing and thought ok, follow me, I’ll follow you. But the utter gibberish that resulted in my twitter feed became tiresome. I really don’t want to hear that a total stranger has learnt something today.
So I’ve culled my twitter follow list and now it includes only my friends, people I think are cool (like Stephen Fry and John Cleese) or who are reporting on an interesting news story (like the Aussie bushfires and their aftermath). People I trust and respect, people I happen to know and like and people who have something I am interested in hearing about.
It may not be quantity but its certainly now quality. Finally, I can see my friends posts again, free of all the online flotsam. As on a London bus, I can’t stop strangers from following me – but at least I can pretend they aren’t.
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