The SoBlog:
don't follow me on twitter

july 13, 2009 I suppose lots of people love Twitter - it is wildly popular.

It always shocks me how many people think their messages, like "I just picked up a latte and I'm getting on the subway" or "Going to the bathroom, BRB", are important enough to post on the web. But I'm even more surprised that other people agree with them. :)

Personally, I think all social networking sites are useless, except LinkedIn. Even on LinkedIn, I still have random people asking me to connect to them. These people invariably get annoyed when I tell them to go away. But I think it's rather dishonest to connect to a thousand random people when your network is supposed be a group of people you already know.

But the occasional random goober on LinkedIn is one thing. The Twitter phenomenon... well, it's completely new to me, and I'm a bit surprised.

I signed up for a Twitter account because my wife is on Twitter. My wife is only on Twitter to help her mom with some research she's doing for a class for her Master's degree. I'm following my wife, and my mother-in-law, who actually is tweeting quite a bit about her work towards her degree.

Within a couple hours of signing up, I had at least a dozen people following me.

Keep in mind, I'm not important, I'm not famous, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to read my tweets. (I'm not planning on tweeting right now, anyhow, but that's besides the point.) So why does anyone care about me?

Well, the jerkwad from the Miami marketing firm that specializes in Social Networking -- I can figure out why he wants to follow me... so he can spam me. But the others just seem like regular people.

I'm a little freaked out here... I mean, I understand a lot of people like being stalked on Twitter. I'm just not so sure whether I like the idea. :)