David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

You followed me on Twitter. Maybe you followed me because you thought what I was saying was interesting. For many they follow people seemingly in order to get a reciprocal follow back. Yet, for some reason I didn’t follow back. A few days later I get an email in my box from Qwitter that you unfollowed me on Twitter, and that’s ok. Why did I not follow you back?

Let’s take a look at the reasons that I didn’t follow you back and think about them a bit:

1. You fell through the cracks- I hate to say it, but Twitter and my social media network aren’t my highest priorities in life at the moment. They are up there, but if push comes to shove then sometimes you get lost in the shuffle and for this I apologize. If you unfollow me, I’ll likely notice and follow you back then if you fell into this category and we can work to make things right. I’m trying to make this one happen less and less.
2. You don’t Tweet in English- I think it’s wonderful that the Internet is filled with people that speak various languages, but unfortunately I only speak English and can grok a bit of Latin at best. If you’re Tweeting in another language that’s really cool, but I’m not going to follow what I can’t read at all. Maybe someday I’ll learn, but thank you for the follow. I assume you’re better than me and can read multiple languages or you wouldn’t have done so.
3. You are clearly a spammer- Twitter has gotten better at catching these, but if you’re a spammer (either automated or just a person that’s an obvious spammer/company) but I don’t follow back people that are just trying to sell their book, diet or new type of kitty litter.
4. Your follow ratios are fucked- These come in two categories. First; I have literally been followed by people following 30,000+ other people, and with 4000 people following them. There is literally no way that a human can parse that much information, or actually care about what I have to say. I will never follow these people back and they are generally also spammers, or soon to be spammers. No thanks. Then there’s the people who just make some bad choices on Twitter. Try to keep your ratio at no worse than 1:1. 0.9:1 is better, as it shows that you aren’t following every spam-bot back yourself and that you likely actually listen to the conversation as it happens. I see a lot of people that are following 400, but only have 40 in return or worse. That’s a 10:1 ratio and uncool. I could expound on this for a while, but basically if you’re following way too many, then I’m not following you back likely. There are occasional exceptions, but that’s the general rule. Your ratios can be a tad off if you’re still in the sub 100 following/followers area. Everyone gets room to learn.
5. You don’t Tweet enough- These happen to sometimes be people with screwed up ratios, and it totally confuses me. I generally assume they are about to turn into spammers. I got followed today by someone that was following 1,300 people and followed by 100. She had tweeted 4 times. Why in the world would you follow 1,300 people but only tweet 4 times?!?! I’m almost never one to complain about over-tweeting and I’d much rather see a person with active and healthy conversations than someone with none.
6. And finally: You aren’t interesting- Ouch. I know that hurts doesn’t it? These are rare, but sometimes if someone is borderline on all of the above things then this really becomes the make or break factor. Actually it can break all of the others pretty easily. If you never @reply, and don’t say at least one thing that makes me think, “That’s something interesting” in your first front page on Twitter then I generally don’t follow you back. Most people luckily are actually interesting.

On the bright side, there’s some people I try to always follow back:

1. People at an event: Unless you are terribly boring, blatently whoring out a product, or something else then if you were at an event I attended I will likely follow you back no matter what. I tried to follow back every single person from Podcamp Pittsburgh (#PCPBG3) regardless of ratios and stuff because they were all cool people and many were still learning about Twitter.
2. People from Boston: Again, unless you terribly violate some of the above then if you are from Boston or nearby I will likely follow you back. I figure there’s a good chance of running into you and it’s pretty embarrassing to have not followed back someone. Plus, we already have something in common and likely know many of the same people
3. You are friend with my friends: If you’re talking a lot with my friends in your first page on Twitter then I’ll likely follow you back. My friends/network can vet people for me.
4. We’ve had a conversation: If you’ve @replied me for something I’ve said, then I’ll likely follow you back. Ditto if you commented on a photo of mine on Flickr or something. Conversation makes me think that I’ll have more of it in the future, which is what I want.

Growing your network is hard and you have to make a lot of decisions along the way. It sometimes conflicts with the fact that you want to keep your signal to noise ratios solid, but at the same time increase your voice and reach. Everyone’s got their own guidelines and methods of doing things. These aren’t the “right” wants, but just my ways of doing it.

How do you determine who to follow and who to ignore and risk having unfollow you?

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret, never to be told

Eight for a wish

Nine for a kiss

Ten for a bird you must not miss

-Traditional English Nursery Rhyme

Magpie is a new Twittter service that brings monetization for your tweets. I didn’t know about it until today when I was watching Julia Roy’s new show TweetWeek (subscribe, its good!)  The bigger you are on Twitter, the more money you’ll make. It inserts small text advertisements, not unlike Google Adsense/Adwords between every so many tweets. It even calculates how much your presence is likely worth a month. Another recent one on the “make money from twitter” camp is TwittAd which is a marketplace for selling ads in your Twitter background.

To be honest, I did think of signing up for Magpie but I have a feeling I’d be left with myself as my only follower (one for sorrow) and completely miss out on the ‘gold’ that we’d all been hoping for. A quick search on Twitter shows that most people are going to unfollow anyone with a #magpie in their tweets. Twitter is a place that’s all about permission, and people don’t want to see ads.

Some interesting things to keep in mind however. First, if the ‘risk’ of placing these ads is great and people shy away then we will end up with a funny supply/demand curve making it so that the value of each tweet for people selling their space should likely go up. At some point this will level off however because enough people will take the ‘risk’ of losing followers to go ahead and do it. Basically the eCPT (effective cost per tweet) will vary a lot of the next few weeks.

Also keep in mind that this is very similar to Adsense and Adsense is what made Google huge. That was Google’s killer app in the end, over gmail and even search in many ways. That’s what has made them the cash. How will this play out in the Twitter realm? Will Twitter buy Magpie up, and intergrate it as a standard option as a monetization path for Twitter?

In the ultimate act of irony, @biz posted to the Twitter blog a plug/link for the TwitterCounter site, which allows you to track the (general growth) of your twitter following. Hours later of course, people aren’t tracking growth but tracking loss due to Moby Dick, the biggest of all fail whales, eating many people’s followers. Twitter’s response is a Douglas Adams like, “Don’t Panic” button saying:

One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

Everyone breathed easy for a moment and assumed this to be the case. Those extra 200 or 2,000 followers you had weren’t really followers but just spammers (I didn’t actually know that Twitter was activity pursuing them, which is good to know). If everyone simply lost the “Spam-follower” inflation, whatever. That’s fine. Readjust and move on. Stop claiming that you have 15,000 followers when they are all spammers.

So what everyone did then was check a follower or two of theirs. There was a fast realization that the guy in the office next to you, who certainly wasn’t a spammer with his paltry one update a day, was no longer following you and vice versa. It wasn’t just spammers. It wasn’t just the “count being off”. Something was fucked.

Twitter hadn’t updated the status blog, but @EV (one of the founders of twitter) did tweet, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the *count*. But the important thing is: It’s being fixed right now. And we know what happened. Do not panic!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still panicing. This isn’t good. This isn’t stable. This makes the Middle East look stable. My followers dropped by over 200, many of them people that I know well. What if Facebook just stopped you from being friends with a huge portion of your friends? What if they removed the linking to your girlfriend and made you ’single’? (For some I know this could likely cause them to actually be single due to the silly politics around Facebook relationship status).

So check out the TwitterCounter. Mine shows buckets of fail. Checking some other friends shows oceanloads of fail. We all said EPIC FAILZ before, but now we know the true meaning of it.