#FollowFriday
- August 20th, 2010
- Posted in Technology
- By sycobuny
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I can’t really get behind Follow Friday. I like it when people mention me, perhaps because I enjoy the confidence boost of someone saying what I think is interesting. But honestly, I don’t think anyone new has ever followed me from being mentioned, and I don’t think I’ve ever followed someone who was mentioned. In spite of the fact that I feel guilty for not giving those people props back, I feel like it would be a disservice to all 20 people and 140 spam bots following me to simply spam a bunch of names of people who have mentioned me.
It wasn’t always that I felt so negative about this particular aspect of Friday, but these days it seems like follow lists are just that: lists of names. If you throw my name in there with about 10 other people in one of 3 tweets that is nothing but names and “#FF”, it doesn’t really show much of an effort. The first times I saw anything about Follow Friday, it had “#FollowFriday” and a single name with a reason to follow them. That’s something worth doing. It shows you’ve put some thought into it. Of course, these days if I actually spent that much time it’d practically seem like a love letter to spend that much time thinking about a single person on my list.
Twitter’s always been a pretty ephemeral medium, so it makes sense that over time processes that occur on it will be condensed. But the law of diminishing utility comes into effect nonetheless. If you give me more and more names and do that at the expense of the “why,” because it’s “more efficient” that way, then you’ve lost any sort of meaning with it. Few people will click through the list and figure out if they want to follow those people as well.
I doubt this will impact anyone and prevent them from doing their own list come Friday, and that’s fine, really. I don’t intend to convince people, but merely explain why I won’t just “hit you back,” as it were. I prefer a high signal-to-noise ratio in my personal Twitter feed, despite what it may seem like sometimes. That’s why I skip the “Good Morning!” tweets and the (to me) meaningless “#FF” list.
Now, #WhiskeyFriday is all well and good, and #FridayReads, in spite of not being alliterative, is just fine by me. Like #MusicMonday (which I haven’t seen in quite some time), I am always ready for some new media (but not New Media) recommendations. I’ve also been told about #FridayRide, though I’ve never actually seen that one before. Hey, biking to work is always good (although for me, it might take about three or four hours each way).
sycobuny, I totally agree with you. #FollowFriday has become meaningless and it becomes less about helping your followers discover someone of quality, and more about people stroking each other’s egos. I see people posting the same string of names every week just to get the same thing back, and it becomes nothing but noise to me.
I also agree with you that if you’re going to suggest that your followers start following someone, you should tell them why. I’m not going to follow someone solely because you told me to; as it is, I follow more people than I can afford to keep up with. Instead, give me a reason; tell me how I’ll benefit by knowing them, even if it’s simply to say that they are smart or witty or highly caring.
I always thought that #FollowFriday originally involved giving people a reason for your suggestion, but now that I look back at its invention, I see that I’m disappointedly mistaken:
http://learntoduck.com/micah/follow-friday
That’s an interesting story for the start of the #FollowFriday phenomenon, but I guess it’s not really surprising. I think a reason is always good, and maybe people will be interested, but most often it’s “this person is the funniest person on Twitter” and humor is most definitely subjective.
One of the main ways I’ve thought would be interesting to find people is Twitter Lists, but it doesn’t really seem like they took off like I thought they would. I personally haven’t updated any list entries of mine in quite some time. Still, I did find quite a few people to follow dealing with PostgreSQL off of Rob Treat‘s “postgres” list.
I’ve thought about doing “themed” follow friday recommendations, like “here are some comic book people” or “here are some Baltimore people” or “here are some nothing-but-potty-humor people” (I follow a shamefully large number of those, but damn it they’re hilarious). But it’s never really happened, partly because I feel once again like I’m doing it just to give a shout back to people who’ve shouted me out, which just seems like the wrong reason to do it. Maybe I’m just over-thinking the whole process.
Yay! You linked my blog post. Yeah, I hear what you mean. I fall into the #FF lists category, but that’s because it’s hard to boil down a referral to 140 characters. Those descriptions fall into 2 camps: “Follow x because he’s hilarious” – (that’s relative) OR “Follow x because (fill in something boring)”. So, they’re either funny or something specialized. I’ve never read a good #FF recommendation, so I didn’t try. How do you boil that down to a tweet? I often wonder how people would describe me: “He tweets about comics, boybands, Saved By The Bell, and pussy.” That wouldn’t exactly be a glowing recommendation, and it runs the spectrum :p
I think of Follow Friday more like “Golden Girls Friday”, i.e. “Thank you for being a friend”. If I’ve had a good conversation/interaction/rapport with someone over the course of the week, they get an #FF spot. It’s just telling my followers “these people made my week, and I think you should check them out”. I leave the judgment up to the audience. They can check out one of the names, and see if that person is their cup of tea. My only rule is that I won’t #FF List people with protected tweets, as I feel you should be able to “sample the goods” before following, and those people don’t want the attention anyway (or else, their tweets wouldn’t be protected).
So, I guess I’m just saying that I don’t tweet those as a lack of effort – it’s just my way of saying “thank you”. I don’t blame you for how you feel, as I feel much the same way. #FF hasn’t resulted in a “win” for me in the followers category, but it’s still “an honor to be nominated”.
That’s not a bad argument, actually. I guess I shouldn’t presume to know what drives a person to list their fellow users. And, again, I wasn’t really trying to convince anyone to do any differently than they do now.
Actually, this post is more like a halfway apology to people (like you) who have listed me towards whom I’ve never responded in kind. Actually, I have responded, but it’s usually complaining that people have given my Twitter name out with two n’s (it happens often enough that I even made an account to redirect people). It isn’t intended as a complaint, but it usually sounds like it, which makes me feel even worse when people correct it and I still don’t mention them back.
I’d actually recommend most people I follow for some reason or another, but I have such a random list that I don’t think anyone would ever add someone new that I mention. For instance: almost all of the comic book people I follow were people you retweeted at one point or another, so you already know about them; most other people that I follow that can be grouped together I found in a much-similar way. Basically, I think all the people I follow already know each other, if they’d want to.
As I said, I do appreciate the mentions I’ve gotten, “an honor to be nominated” as you put it. Every week I revisit the issue, and maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but for now at least people who would otherwise get a shout now know why I’m such a jackass about it
Follow Friday is just another marketing vehicle. I use it to spread my brand around twitter and, hopefully, gain more readership for my comic.
In a non-self promotional mindset, it’s an awful / creepy activity