Netiquette on Twitter
25 November, 2008Besides flamewars I wonder what netiquette users follow on Twitter. When for example I reply on a blog and I leave my Twitter url, this blogger might add me on their list of friends, basically a list of users they follow. Also when people find out I write my master thesis on Twitter or some art project they might start to follow me. Yesterday I was playing around with the search option and tried to find people near my and through my postal code found another user and I thought it would be nice to say hi. Next thing I knew I had been added to his list of friends and I was being followed. Don’t get me wrong, I like being added so please keep following me! The thing is I don’t know if I should follow people in return as some tweet all day long and it’s hard to keep up. But is it rude not to follow people? They cannot see that I occasionally check their page anyway through my list of followers. Is there a netiquette I should know of? Should I follow anonymously or not?
Interesting thoughts. Let’s ask a return question: why should you want to “keep up”? And what is “keeping up” anyway actually? I always compare it with being in a pub or at a conference: there’s lots of interesting talk going on and I never get all of it, but that what’s interesting gets to me in one way or another (retweeted, read in backlog, read specific users pages etc).
According to Genesis:
Stay with me,
My love I hope youll always be
Right here by my side if ever I need you
Oh my love
In your arms,
I feel so safe and so secure
Everyday is such a perfect day to spend
Alone with you
I will follow you will you follow me
All the days and nights that we know will be
I will stay with you will you stay with me
Just one single tear in each passing year
With the dark,
Oh I see so very clearly now
All my fears are drifting by me so slowly now
Fading away
I can say
The night is long but you are here
Close at hand, oh Im better for the smile you give
And while I live
I will follow you will you follow me
All the days and nights that we know will be
I will stay with you will you stay with me
Just one single tear in each passing year there will be
I will follow you will you follow me
All the days and nights that we know will be
I will stay with you will you stay with me
Just one single tear in each passing year…
Well, to me this urge to “keep up” or the moral obligation I usually feel about showing interest in the lives of my friends, is precisely what makes me selective about involving myself in media like Twitter. I love to drink coffee with my friends, I love to hear what they have to say while doing so. When they keep a weblog to communicate their views on the world, I love to follow them in that. But keeping up with all the trivialities of someone else’s everyday life is something beyond my capacity of interest, or at best restricted to the people I share my roof and table with.