reciprocity

When I first joined Twitter, I have to admit, I didn't really get it.

It was simple enough to set up an account and the basic functionality was self-explanatory. However the very basic search function (this was some time ago and has now improved) didn't help me to find anybody I knew, or people in my area, or people with the same interests. After the first couple of days, my account lay dormant for a few months.

Project 366 on flickr prompted me to give Twitter another go. A few of the other people on the project said they were using Twitter and invited others to join in. Even with just a few followers that reciprocated the thing begins to make some sense. Even though most of the tweets are banal, the day to day sharing causes a relationship to build. When I took the nanowrimo challenge last year, my follower base grew quite considerably.

The list of people I now follow have become Twitter contacts, regardless of how I first encountered them. I try to keep the number of people I follow between 100 and 150 as this seems like a reasonable number to provide variety without losing sight of people. Probably this is a far lower number than most active users.

There is quite a lot of debate about whether reciprocal follows are a: good or bad thing; whether they are polite or just playing a numbers game. Personally I think everybody should just use the service the way they want to.

My rule of thumb is:

• If I follow a celebrity or a news service or a business; I do so because I want to hear what they have to say, and I don't expect a follow back
• If I follow someone-else; it is because I want to share with them and build an on-line relationship, so if they don't follow-back within a week or two, I drop them
• If someone follows me; unless they are obviously a spammer or otherwise offensive, I will usually follow back
• Occasionally a "keyword" in one of my tweets will generate a small flurry of automated follows and these I usually just ignore

Hmm "online relationship" sounds a bit creepy but I think you know what I mean: it's about enjoying sharing the daily minutiae and being able to celebrate a piece of good news or console when things aren't so good.

At the moment Twitter is probably the only social software that I have used that actually lives up to the title of "social". I hope it continues to thrive in that way.

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