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Is Twitter broken? Or am I losing friends? Twitter is broken.

October 14th, 2008 · Comments

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Here are some quick links to topics I write about often like Twitter, Nashville and Marketing. Thanks for visiting!

Something is wrong with this picture (the pictures below actually). I just ran my name in www.friendorfollow.com, a great service that produces a list of people you’re following, but who are not following you back. The problem is that many of the people who appear not to be following me are friends who I know are (or think they are).

Cali Lewis and Tod Maffin are good examples of friends who I have run into this problem with before when I tried to send them a direct message (DM). They confirmed that they were following me again, but now they are not. Hmmm….

Try Friend or Follow for yourself and let me know the results. Are people appearing as non-followers who you know should be following you?

Any comments from my friends at Twitter are welcome (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

If you’re in the images below, you’re not following me. Please fix this by hitting: http://www.twitter.com/davedelaney and press FOLLOW (but you already knew that).

Twitter friends not following
Twitter friends not following

On a related note, I’ll be speaking at BarCamp Nashville during the morning this Saturday. My session is called Microblogging: Fast, Fast, Good, Good. I hope you can make it.

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Tags: Twitter · friends · microblogging

Viewing 4 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Twitter isn't broken. Well it's broken, but not in the way that you're claiming it is. It's easy to check the validity of a Friend or Follow result. Click the image of a person and it'll send you to the Twitter website. If there's the option to Message someone on the right side under Actions, they follow you. If not, they don't. Third party Friend or Follow style tools are often pretty broken, they also sometimes have trouble with processing accounts with many thousands of followers. The only tools / scripts I can really trust are my own.

    Taking a quick look at the Avatars above, a bulk of them are broadcasters who only follow a handful of those that follow them so not being followed back by them looks pretty normal.

    Jeremy
    @penguin
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks Jeremy:
    I agree with you on many of the avatars in the images I posted, but a good
    number are friends who "were" following me. So what gives there, if they
    aren't unfollowing me, how is this happening?
    • ^
    • v
    This is a very interesting topic. I'm just stream of consciousness'ing here, but it is something I've thought a little about.

    Friends in real life tend to associated based on shared life experiences. Sometimes it's that you happen to exist in the same place, like school or work. Sometimes it's around shared interests, like a sports team or music.

    One thing I noticed on FaceBook is how much i DO NOT have in common with people I call friends. It's almost like technology is begining to magnify difference. Let me explain. I have a friend who loves a certain band. I can't stand that band, but I really like this person. Our real friendship has naturally evolved to exclude that band ever coming up. That happens very organically and naturally. Now, enter technology. My friend is constantly bombarding me with crap about this band online. What do I do? UNSUBSCRIBE - DEFRIEND - UNFOLLOW.

    It's not really a judgement on friendship, because friendship and real relationships are broader than technology's trend toward narrowcasting.

    I suspect this will soon enough become a subject for sociologists who will discover something very new about our relationships and how they form and last thanks to being able to see connections through technology. But don't take it personally, and most importantly, if you want to grow your online audience, this can be the toughest advice (at least it's a challenge for me I am learning to address): broad appeal grows online audience. If you want people to react to you based on their prejudices, broadcasting hyper-focused interests to a wide open channel will do that. Instead, create channels specifically for that content - groups, seperate twitter accounts, etc.

    Liek I said, this is all stream of consciousness here, not well thought out, but something I've been thinking about myself. My conclusion is it's all good and that no one is saying they don't like you. They are just saying their freindship is more valuable than having to endure your love for that stupid band.
    • ^
    • v
    CC Chapman had a great episode of Managing The Gray some time ago where he
    talked about "friends" vs "Friends. He had some great insight.
    For me, if my friends are spamming me I send them this:
    http://www.thanksno.com/

    Cheers.
    Dave
 

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