I’m not going to name names here (that would be rude), but I generally feel inclined to point out an apparent contradiction when I see it.  

It is not my intention to single out one person unnecessarily, this is merely the proverbial straw: –  

i ♥ my followers, thank you ☺if you are a new one, check out my twitter introduction video [link removed] and make me one 2cu!!! 24 minutes ago from Future Tweets

and 

I want to apologize if I didn’t reply to every tweet☹ I will always try, but sometimes I get so many!!! Just chat w/ me again!!!✌ about 4 hours ago from Future Tweets

Ok, on face value that looks ok doesn’t it? Very polite, and this individual cares that they are too busy to be able to catch up with everyone each day. The problem is, these messages have been appearing repeatedly over the past several days, and aren’t even coming directly from a person.

Look at the source of the message: “from Future Tweets”. One of the benefits of actually viewing the website directly once in the while is to see the tools people are using to send their tweets, and there are some wonderful clients out there, but that is a topic for another day.  I picked these two messages because they come from a site called “Future Tweets”.

Future Tweets, as the website describes, is for this: -

FutureTweets.com is a free service that lets you schedule your Twitter messages. Send it at a specific time in the future or send a reoccuring Tweet daily, weekly, monthly or yearly!

You’ll never forget the birthdays of your beloved Twitter friends again! Just schedule a nice Tweet on their birthday!

It also goes onto say: -

Most people use it because it’s fun to:

  • Send status updates to Twitter even when your away from your phone or computer!
  • Have an alibi…
  • Automaticaly wish your friend a wonderfull day each morning
  • Remind yourself each friday evening to quit work early and go for the friday evening drinks…
  • ¡spɹɐʍʞɔɐq ƃuıʇǝǝʍʇ ʎq spuǝıɹɟ ɹnoʎ ʎouuɐ

Well, obviously (aside from the awful spelling), posting messages backwards is annoying.   I can’t see the benefit in annoying the people I call “friends”.  I also don’t need any help leaving work early.  Then comes the one I love the most: – “Automatically wish your friend a wonderful day each morning”. 

Imagine getting a phone call each day that played back the same recording from your friend saying how much they care about you and love you.   Now imagine that instead of it being a specific message, it has become a generic recording saying “Dear friend. I really care about you and love you very much.”.  As for the birthday example above, maybe we should all just hire an assistant to remember our loved ones birthdays and send them cards on our behalf.

It starts to lose its shine, doesn’t it.  One of the amazing things about Social Media (and I am by no means some kind of expert, self-proclaimed or otherwise), is that it allows us to communicate and share ideas with people we would not normally meet.  This can be a wonderful thing, but  it does require a certain investment in time.  

Accumulating followers can be a rewarding experience, especially if you are interested in sharing ideas with them.  But I have seen recently (and remember that I am new to Twitter myself), a number of people with huge numbers of followers who seem to have run into a problem.  That problem is that they now have so many connections in their network, that they don’t have enough time to keep track of them.  

It can be very tempting (and I understand it can come from not wanting to be seen to be ignoring people), to start sending automated messages to people when they follow you or message you.  I’ve replied to a few of these in my early days thinking “Wow! this person took the time to message me back”, but alas they had not. Handling massive numbers of followers almost seems to have become a business in itself, with sites and tools designed to automate our relationships with people.

Now, it is true that I can’t sit on twitter every hour of every day, and with around 100 or so followers, with my meagre time constraints I sometime find it hard to reply to people or keep in touch every day.  But I have this odd feeling that everyone is in that same boat, that we all have lives outside of twitter, and no-one really expects people to reply to every single thing that they tweet each day. No-one really expects an off-the-bat reply when they follow you.  It’s nice but we all deep down realize everyone else has a life too.

I would appreciate seeing messages less frequently from people knowing that they wanted to post them and did not feel somehow obligated, or took the time to say something meaningful.

There are so many sites about giving us a score, comparing us to other people on twitter in terms of followers, percentiles, how hot we are or how cold we are.  I’m not even going to mention them here, lest on the off chance someone actually reads this post (unlikely) and starts getting obsessed by them. 

One simple question remains.  When does it become less about ideas, friendships and interaction, and more about getting that perfect score – about being more this or more that than someone else? When does having a large number of followers become more important than the free flowing conversation.

There are some truly wonderful people out there with huge numbers of followers. The ones that really stand out are the ones that perhaps don’t reply very often, but when they do – you appreciate it all the more.

Remember: silence is better than an automated message or response.  People will appreciate you for what you say, not how frequently you tweet.  It it isn’t working that way, then perhaps we are all doing this for the wrong reasons.

Rant ends. We now resume your normal programming.

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