{"id":373,"date":"2008-04-29T12:32:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T17:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.opticality.com\/blog\/?p=373"},"modified":"2008-04-29T18:08:48","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T23:08:48","slug":"new-twitter-followers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/29\/new-twitter-followers\/","title":{"rendered":"New Twitter Followers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using Twitter for a very long time (thanks Jamie, even though you deserted us for a while). \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I have had it set to IM me (via Jabber) whenever anyone tweets, and forever, that was working. A while ago (quite a while ago), those messages stopped coming. I was able to send tweets via IM, but I never got an update for someone else any longer.<\/p>\n

On time, also a long time ago, I turned off the IM channel, then turned it back on, and for a short while (days?) I received tweets via IM again, then they stopped.<\/p>\n

Recently, I installed Twhirl (an Adobe AIR fat client for Twitter) so I didn’t care. Then I installed (same day) AlertThingy (also an AIR client). AlertThingy (at first) only attached to FriendFeed stuff, so I still had to launch Twhirl in order to see tweets from people that I am not also a FriendFeed subscriber of. Ugh.<\/p>\n

A recent update of AlertThingy (or I missed it originally!) now also includes full Twitter integration, so I no longer have to launch Twhirl.<\/p>\n

Anyway, none of that has to do with the title of this post. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

This morning, I noticed that two of the people that I follow both tweeted that they have seen a big jump in followers. Having nothing to do with that (but having it lodged somewhere in my brain), I logged on to twitter.com<\/a> for the first time in a very long while.<\/p>\n

I accidentally noticed a tiny link on the bottom right hand corner showing 14 new requests to be followed. That was quite surprising. Who knew how long they’ve been sitting there?<\/p>\n

So, out of the 14 requests, I knew eight of those people (and approved all of them right away). A ninth person is someone I don’t personally know (or at least I don’t think I do), but he’s a good buddy of two people I do know, so I happily accepted him as well.<\/p>\n

That left five strangers. Of them, one seemed to have a very interesting business take in her tweets, so I accepted her. Two seemed to be following over 50K (yes, thousand!) people, so I can safely assume that I’m not all that special<\/em> to them, and I declined them. The other two I just haven’t decided yet, and I’m letting them sit.<\/p>\n

So, I’ve gone from four followers to 14 followers, in a five minute span. Nothing like the one buddy who tweeted this morning that he’s up to 1000 followers!<\/p>\n

That said, I keep my tweets private<\/strong>, as I do for my FriendFeed<\/a> as well. I’m honestly not sure why I do. Everything that I tweet about is personal (no big business secrets to worry about spilling to the world). After the fact, I often blog about what I tweeted about in advance. In other word, my tweets are often “Going to a concert”, followed the next morning by a blog about the concert.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the blog is available for all to see, forever, so why not just open up the tweets as well? I don’t know, but since I have zero<\/strong> need\/desire for a complete stranger<\/strong> to know (or care) about what I’m about<\/strong> to do, it just makes sense to me.<\/p>\n

The blog side is different. I am shocked (and pleased) as to how many people find my posts via normal searches, and I know (hopefully they would agree!) that often my post has answered their exact question (if they have the patience to read my long-windedness). \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

If any of you have strong opinions as to the benefits of opening up my tweets and\/or FriendFeed, please feel free to weigh in here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using Twitter for a very long time (thanks Jamie, even though you deserted us for a while). \ud83d\ude09 I have had it set to IM me (via Jabber) whenever anyone tweets, and forever, that was working. A while ago (quite a while ago), those messages stopped coming. I was able to send tweets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,2],"tags":[198,281],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4","category-3","category-2","tag-social-networking","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}