Wonderbox

I recently found out about Twitter (yes, I have been living in the dark ages) and went through this introduction video:

Based on this video, i thought it is a really cool thing and I totally got it; I immediately setup my account. Twitter helps you search for your friends from your popular email accounts like GMail, Yahoo Mail etc and find your friends that may already be on Twitter. I did not find many of my friends there so I went ahead and emailed my friends and actually convinced them to setup accounts as well.

Today, there are maybe only 4 people on my Twitter account, from amongst the ones who are following me, who are people I know (yes, it is called following). Most of the others are service providers and others are people I just don’t know - they seem to have found something common with me.

This is where I really have a problem with this system. The intro video told me that Twitter allows you to keep in touch with people but I don’t think that people who created Twitter even thought of the ways people are going to end up using it. You have web celebrities, artists, online businesses all using Twitter accounts and the moment they notice that you wrote a tweet on something that possibly overlaps with their interest, they start following you. How do you differentiate between users who are genuinely interested in knowing what you are up to (this is the optimistic side of me talking) and the users who are just interested in - you-know-what: Stalking? How safe can one feel on Twitter?

Then, there are other questions like, Is it rude to not follow someone who is following you? I actually tried looking up if there was something like Twitter Etiquette (found this one link: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Twitter-Etiquette). There is also this fear that if you don’t follow the person who is following you, you will end up loosing them as your follower. Trust me, everyone on Twitter, does take pleasure in showing off the number of followers they have.

Having opened my box of what may sound like complaints, it is not like these have kept me from using Twitter. I use it very religiously. As a bonus, it also updates my Facebook status and allows my not so cool friends (friends who are not yet on Twitter) get the privilege of knowing my status updates (i like to pretend that they care).

Over a  period of time, I have realised that you do have the power to contro,l who you want to include as your Follower, and what you put on there for people to see. It all comes down to using your common sense.