My Thoughts on Follow Friday

Follow Friday is a practice that has gained quite a following on Twitter. What is Follow Friday, you ask? A nice, friendly definition can be found here, but I’ll excerpt it for you.

Follow Friday is a twitter meme that is used to call attention to followers that they should check out and follow the people you are highlighting or recommending.

I, naturally, have a problem with this. (I have a problem with most things, don’t I?) In theory, the idea sounds great. The actuality makes me want to hide on Fridays from Twitter. The stream becomes mostly noise. Every other post in my stream seems to have #followfriday attached to it. The sad thing is, I don’t pay attention to a one of them.

Like anyone who is verbose on twitter, there are people who recommend me during Follow Friday. The most common form I see are just lists of people. I’m slammed in there with the rest of the lot. There’s nothing that distinguishes Bob from Sue or Sue from Tammie. You have no reason other than they were a part of the list to check them out. At one point, I thought about spending time going through every list I was mentioned in, until I realized that was still not quite worth it. None of the tweets I pursued seemed to group the people together in any meaningful way.

So, I suppose I don’t disagree with the thought of the thing. The idea that we recommend people we like to the people who listen to what we say sounds like a great thing. The noise that it brings to the table annoys me. It doesn’t seem to add anything useful to the stream and leaves me scrambling to find good content or conversations on Friday.