Twitter Sanity

Sam Harrelson on March 13, 2009

Twitter Followers

Scott Jangro and I are recovering from an interesting experiment in which we followed back everyone who followed us. Sounds pretty simple and easy, right?

Well, it is an easy task to click “Follow” under a person’s avatar, but it is a much more difficult thing to give away a sense of sanity on Twitter.

Jangro explains it incredibly well:

Does anybody really think that anyone with thousands of followers is reading anything but a select list of tweets? What’s the use of an army of followers who follow everybody back? Especially at the expense of having to follow them and ruining twitter for yourself. Neither cares about what each other has to say. It’s just a game of who has the biggest, uh, Twitter.

I’ve cut down from the 4,500 or so people I was following back to the 100 or so folks that I am actually interested in or care about. Twitter is completely usable again on my Touch, on the web, on my mobile and on the desktop via TweetDeck.

So, it’s all well and good to follow everyone who follows you if you are looking to gain more followers on Twitter. However, doing so comes at a cost of usability of the service (much more than the cost of losing a few bots as followers as shown in the chart above).

Talking Futurisms, Podcasts, and Ethics

Sam Harrelson on March 13, 2009

I chatted with Andrew Wee on his Friday Podcast this week about a number of topics.

Here’s his show notes:

– How he got involved in online marketing and his quest to become a Renaissance man.
– How he has “given up marketing”
– Ethics and morals in affiliate marketing
– What inspires him to podcast
– The origin and direction of his Thinking.fm podcast network
– Monetization options for podcast network owners
– One of his favorite podcasts and why it works effectively

Head over to Andrew’s site and give it a listen. I always enjoy talking to him, and it’s always amazing to me that we can do a podcast together even though we’re on opposite sides of this pale blue rock.

Here’s the mp3 for your downloading pleasure.