I thought I taw a pouldycat.

May 23, 2008 8:31 AM

What is the deal with people who are following 800 others on Twitter and have no website linked to their account? I'm talking (apparently) private citizens here, not brands. You look at their twitter page, and it's just a photo, a name, and 800 friends. What are they trying to accomplish? Do they really read all the incoming tweets? Are they just hoping to make some random selection of people interested in them?
posted by bingo to computers & internet (17 comments total)

I imagine it's something like people on MySpace/Facebook that have 14,000 "real friends."
posted by Nelsormensch at 8:43 AM on May 23, 2008

Nelsormensch: Yeah, and what does *that* mean?
posted by bingo at 8:45 AM on May 23, 2008

It's not necessarily complicated. I signed up for Twitter because it was the latest shiny web toy. I listed my Twitter ID on my Metafilter profile. Every day, I get one or two "so-and-so is following you on Twitter" emails. Without thinking much about it, I click the link to their Twitter page and start following them. It just seems polite, since they are following me.
posted by grumblebee at 8:53 AM on May 23, 2008

Market research?
posted by unknowncommand at 8:54 AM on May 23, 2008

A lot of them are spammy. They hope that if they follow lots of people, they'll find opportunities to plug their websites or products in @replies or direct messages
posted by chrisamiller at 9:06 AM on May 23, 2008

I did it to see if i could, and to play with the jabber libraries for perl. I figured maybe i'd find a use for the account, but didn't. I haven't logged into it in months. Basically if you posted to the live stream during the few hours i was doing that, I am following you.
* Following 2,849
* Followers 744
* Favorites 0
* Updates 3
posted by duckstab at 9:07 AM on May 23, 2008

grumblebee, auto-mutual following has resulted in embarassment for some who did it with a white supremacist serial follower on Twitter.

If a Twitter user I don't know follows me with thousands of followers and is full of links, self-promotion, and the words "marketing" or "SEO," I block. Otherwise if it looks like a normal person I dismiss him or her as an overzealous follow-addict who hasn't figured things out all the way yet.
posted by brownpau at 9:09 AM on May 23, 2008

"who hasn't figured things out all the way yet."

Because, of course, you have 'figured it out all the way' and have discovered the One True Way to properly use Twitter, right?


Someone might follow 800 people on twitter out of curiosity, because they use Twitter a lot, because the person in question has said something funny/agreeable, or 1,000 other reasons. Basically: there's no one reason for people following a lot of others. Sometimes it probably is for self-promotion, spam, or something else... but it might be something else entirely.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:31 AM on May 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Let me clarify the question. What are these people doing after they sign up to follow 800 people? Are they actually reading regular updates from all 800 of them? Checking in to twitter.com and idly scrolling through them all to see if there's anything interesting? Or maybe they just want their own twitter page to say "following 800 people" because of some geek coolness factor? (But wouldn't the coolness factor come from 800 people following them, and not the other way around?)
posted by bingo at 9:48 AM on May 23, 2008

i just recently signed up for twitter and was wondering wtf with random people following a gazillion folks suddenly following me. now i feel more informed. YAY ASKMEFI.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:02 AM on May 23, 2008

It depends. I think some people are just sort of advertising themselves. There's one guy, I think his name is Juan-something, who follows literally thousands of people, and posts little nuggets of wisdom, Poor Richard's Almanac type stuff. Dude follows everybody, including me. Personally, I think he's just using Twitter for output, not really reading the feed at all, just trying to make a small name for himself.

Guys like that strike me as odd -- one in particular started following me, and when I checked him out, he was following like 14,000 people, and half his tweets were "I swear to God I'm not a spammer, I'm not linking anything here." I have no idea what they get out of it.

Then there are guys like Ze Frank and Robert Scoble who follow anyone who follows them. Frank does so to get people to play weird and fun Twitter-based games with him, and I think he really does read his feed, though I imagine it's just a sort of "read what's on the front page now for a random sampling of what's going on-slash-direct messages to me." Kind of like reading the Matrix, only dorkier.
posted by middleclasstool at 10:10 AM on May 23, 2008

Are they actually reading regular updates from all 800 of them?

I almost never actually go to twitter.com. I use twitterific (a little app for the mac desktop). I leave it on, way over to the side of other windows. New tweets show up in it constantly. I barely pay attention. Sometimes I glance over and see if anyone I'm friendly with (or entertained by) has posted.

I basically relate to it like as if it was a screensaver.
posted by grumblebee at 10:16 AM on May 23, 2008

You can use applications to follow people without going through the Twitter web interface. You can also follow a lot of people that rarely update and/or get the updates in your RSS reader. I follow maybe 200 (not super update-y) people and just load the tweets up when I have a network connection and then read them on a plane or whatever.
posted by jessamyn at 10:35 AM on May 23, 2008

Okay, maybe I'm just not in the target audience. When someone follows me, it does not by any stretch mean that I'm going to follow them without knowing a lot more about them. I'm disturbed to discover that my attitude in this regard is unusual.

Similarly, I do use device updates...I get all the tweets via gtalk. Having them any more in the background, and they might as well be turned off. But...whatever.
posted by bingo at 4:08 PM on May 23, 2008

I'm disturbed to discover that my attitude in this regard is unusual.

I don't think this is terribly unusual, at least the not-automatically-following part. Most people I know and follow don't auto-follow everyone, even not counting spammers. I follow plenty of people who don't follow me back, and there are a few that follow me that I don't reciprocate for. For me it's not a question of needing to know a lot more about you, though. For me it's just a question of whether I'm interested in reading your tweets, for whatever reason.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:13 PM on May 23, 2008

I'm disturbed to discover that my attitude in this regard is unusual.

I agree with MCT, it's not at all unusual. For me it's a question of whether I want to read what you have to write but also how often you update. So if you're one of those update 20 times a day people I won't follow you even if you're my bff [special exception for Merlin Mann, but sometimes....]. I think people are still exploring the outlines of how "most" people use this sort of thing and there's not a lot of standard practices yet.
posted by jessamyn at 6:22 PM on May 23, 2008

special exception for Merlin Mann, but sometimes....

Heh. I think you and I might be the same person. The irony is that he's the productivity guru.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:39 PM on May 23, 2008