Twitter is new to me (@serialbox)- yeah for someone who claims to be all about new web stuff I’m a little behind the times.  Honestly I had just gotten sick and tired of all the social networking sites popping up everywhere that I really just thought Twitter would die off to a small grouping of people but how wrong I was.  It seems that only recently Twitter has made a huge jump in the amount of active users.  Just take a look at this graph taken from Twitter’s Alexa Ranking page showing a sharp rise in Twitter’s reach and page views from late last year until now.

As you can see, more and more people are beginning to use twitter, and people like me are resuming use of an account started ages ago.  I admit I am a little blown away at the speed at which things travel through twitter and in a very short amount of time (5 days) Ive managed to build myself a list of 80+ followers.  My problem, however, is determing what quality followers are vs. useless followers!

I come across some twitter profiles that have 30,000+ followers, and following just as many and I’m just blown away at how they manage that many people.  I have enough trouble wading through the stream on my twitter page from the 69 people I’m following.  It seems it’s become a matter of who can get the most followers without worrying about substance.  It’s great and all to achieve such a high number of followers but you have to remember that with that many people following, you are obligated to provide quality tweets and information that people can use.

I’ve found that random people are adding me to their follow list and I’m assuming they are expecting a follow in return but to me this defeats the whole purpose of Twitter.  I truly appreciate anyone and everyone who follows me on Twitter and I do try to provide useful information and the odd joke but my time is valuable as is yours and to expect a follow in return for a follow is asking too much.

Do you feel obligated to follow someone in return just because they have followed you?  I want to hear what you have to say!

Back to quality vs useless followers and the one thing that irk’s me the most on Twitter – AUTO-DM.  I have followed you on Twitter because I found something of value in what you’ve either said or wrote somewhere on the Internets however just because I’ve followed you does not mean I want to receive your spam via Twitter DM telling me about the website that I can see is already listed in your Twitter Bio and then continue to receive these messages every couple of days.  I know where you are… I followed you.. I know where to find your stuff… please stop spamming because it only results in me unfollowing you and others following suit.

Retweets??  Well that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother post I’ll put together later but in short, if you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything at all.  While I am all for re-tweets and promoting other people’s work I’ve found a number of people who do nothing BUT retweet other people’s messages and that can be annoying as it clutters my feed with garbage.

I’d also like to take this oppurtunity to make mention of an awesome contest being put together by @tedmurphy who is giving away a free trip to Orlando Sea World to experience the brand new Manta Mania 3 Rollercoaster.

Sorry for the rant but needed to get that out.  A more civil post to follow and I’m now heading for that cliff so followers lets go!