The Democracy of Follow Fridays

Rachel Weingarten — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:52:47 +0000

For those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of 140 character micro-blogging site Twitter, there’s a wonderful phenomenon known as Follow Fridays. In the spirit of sharing and community, people (or Tweeple as one of the ever expanding Twitter nicknames would have you call us) can recommend Twitter users to their followers and help them to expand their reach or just find someone fun to follow. This is accomplished by way of a short introduction, or just a series of Twitter IDs followed by #FollowFriday. (The # in this case being a hash tag which is used to help chronicle and monitor searches on a certain topic).

As we find out more and more about the funding of Twitter- the tens of millions of dollars invested with no clue as to its viability or the existence of any kind of revenue model (a rant for another time) it’s nice to know that the feeling of community is alive and well despite the imminent commercialization of the medium and breakdown of formalized and more traditional work or real world communities.

In the land of Twitter you can follow politicians like President Barack Obama who used the medium to great effect when still a candidate with nary an update since his election, Arnold Schwarzenegger as he sets policies, or celebrities like Greg Grunberg (who admitted to dancing around wildly with his children as he hit 10,000 followers a few weeks back) or the always droll and entertaining Stephen Fry. As for me, I’ll happily avoid the Demi Moore and Ashton Kutscher cuteness in favor of slowly growing my own network of trusted tweeps- but you’ll have to see who they are on Follow Friday!

Rachel @rachelcw to my tweeps

Rachel C. Weingarten muses on Marketing, Manners and Modness » follow Friday

The Democracy of Follow Fridays