Archive for August 2nd, 2009

For the Uninitiated: Twitter is a social media application where you can post mini-updates and view the updates of others. People who have been doing it a while sometimes have thousands of followers. Many who wish to have a large following have in the past followed everyone who follows them, sometimes automatically. It’s a friendly thing to do, and you don’t have to read everyone’s updates. In fact, after you start following more than 50 or so people, there’s basically no way you can.  At that point you either take pot luck or go on TweetDeck, an application for the Twitter application, and construct a list of the people you’re really, really following — your “inner circle” as @DaivRawks would call it, or your “crew” as @BillCammack would say. Meanwhile, if anyone from the greater group wants you, they can either @message you — send you a public “hey remember me?” call — or they can send you a direct message (DM), which is private.

And Now the Main Story:

The problem is with the DM’s. Increasingly, Twitter is becoming attractive to people who are trying to sell stuff. And increasingly, these types add you, you innocently and as a friendly gesture add back, and they send you a DM promoting their services. This is particularly a problem for users who access Twitter via cell phone SMS, because the commercial DM’s are blowing out their inboxes. For the rest of us, they’re just a garden variety iritation, which becomes worse and worse the more of the things you get.

Anyway, last week social media guru and prince @ChrisBrogan, who is followed by something like a 100,000 people, threw down the gauntlet. No more auto-following. The DM’s were just too out of control.

It was interesting to me when I read it, because quietly and undramatically and not followed by nearly six figures of people (last Twitter count was 1450 or so followers, many of whom I suspect are no longer reading my updates and which inevitably contains some MLM people and the like) I had come to the same conclusion. Thankfully, now twitter gives you a mini-profile on everyone who appears on your followers list. Instead of auto-following people, I go down the line, check out their location, their avatar, their bio and their latest tweet, and I can usually tell if they’re a spammer or not.

For a lower-volume user like me, it works. @ChrisBrogan, on the other hand, has had to resort to requesting that those who are legit @message him if they want him to follow back. But mine is a human system, so it’s not failproof. Imaging my irritation when someone I had hand-followed shot back an instant DM last week:

“Check us out at blahblahblah.com  for stunning marketing solutions … we can and do help people just like you … “

Oops. Looks like I’ve had a Personally-Administered Twitter Adding System error. Only remedy? Hand-Unfollow. Okay. All better now. See the rest of you soon.