To Follow Friday or not to #FollowFriday - 5/16/09

That is the question. I recently read some insightful complaints about the misuse of a Twitter tradition called Follow Friday in which the blogger, an interesting enough if rookie blogger/tweeter, did a great job of describing what’s wrong with #FollowFriday when practiced by the overly self-conscious and unobservant. One of the best things about Twitter is that we can just choose. If someone we follow posts gratuitous #FollowFriday tweets, which may lack adequate description, whether properly or improperly hashtagged, we can 1) unfollow this person or 2) ignore them on Fridays. #FollowFriday is essentially the same as the long-time practice of givin’ a little “Link Love” in the blogosphere (like this: Paula's got it going on and Dangerblond's got her groove back). It might be introducing a friend new to the medium, or pointing out someone who’s particularly clever or funny (see Addendum 2), and it’s best to just say so.

This isn’t as much Twittiquette as it is a Life Skill. Demonstrating a generous spirit coupled with an awareness of how what you say and do is perceived by others as it rattles through the universe applies to real life interactions as well as virtual. The author, whose young blog I liked enough to watch for a while and see how it develops (if I can only remember to do so), should be forgiven for going too far in my opinion, for suggesting doing away with Follow Fridays entirely. Superfluous #FollowFriday by the socially unaware might be a minor irritant in a tweet stream, and it probably clogs up or at least skews the Trending Topics and/or retweeting rankings, but I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it’s easy enough to just look at something else instead.

Gary Vaynerchuk just said essentially the same thing talking about Twitter in an interview on Your Money on CNN: "It's word of mouth on steroids... If it's quality, it gets expanded." In other words, the general rules of the universe apply in the virtual world.

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Addendum 1: This post began as a comment on Richard Reed's blog first linked in this post. Some of the content is verbatim the comment I first posted on his blog.

Addendum 2: Here's an example of a useful Follow Friday tweet: #followfriday @trappedinawell Still the cleverest thing happening on Twitter. Drop something.