Do you view following as a commitment and unfollowing like a broken promise — or worse — a divorce?  Do you watch your follower count and immediately unfollow anyone who has unfollowed you as if to say, “AHA! You don’t deserve to have me as a follower when you don’t follow me!”

What does following mean to you?

Most of us have had it happen.  Someone you converse with on a regular or fairly regular basis – you might even consider this person a friend – stops following you.  Maybe you tried to send a DM and couldn’t.  Or maybe you’re obsessive-compulsive frantic and oh-so-devastated over the loss of even one spam or pr0n bot follower and endlessly review your follower count, your follow-to-followed ratio and your follower growth metrics.

One…One Thousand…One Meellyun? Meh.

I don’t fret over my follower count.  I routinely clear out spammers and other questionable accounts as well as unfollow random tweeps whose conversations I really don’t want associated with me.   I’m sure that’s snobbish to some.  I’m not a Twitter Saint by any means.  But if you’re tweeting about how much pipe you laid last weekend while you were drinking like an Amish junior college freshman, straight off the farm and very curious about life in the big city, pretty much, there’s not a commonality there that I want to explore.

If that description fits you – first – wow. I might want to meet you – just for research purposes – under some very secure circumstances.  Second, unfollowing you is not a judgment of you, your lifestyle or your value as a human being.

The people I follow add value to my Twitstream for professional and personal reasons.  They are peers, mentors, role models, industry leaders, amusing and engaging people I just can’t live without.  Most of the people I follow also follow me and I converse with them on a regular basis. Of the handful who are not following me, I have conversations with some of them on occasion.  All of these folks I follow so that I can glean knowledge and understanding from their expertise and experience.  It’s a priceless opportunity that I feel very fortunate to enjoy.

My twitter-style?  I do discuss some technical geeky things in my stream, but for the most part, Twitter is a way for me to make real connections, forge and extend relationships, and contribute to a wonderful microuniverse of my own design.  This means a good bit of my “conversation” is personal, odd commentary on what I see or what I’m doing.  I act as a resource or a commentator when asked.  Interactive. That’s me.

There are also a number of folks I don’t know who follow me.  I’m not sure why they follow me.  Some folks are more voyeuristic.  Or they are snooping for scandals.  <LOL>  If I am not following someone and they engage me – I do interact.  Once I get to know someone I will follow them if we share the daily things that add to my stream.  Again, this isn’t a judgment.  I still read other streams of folks who follow me that I don’t follow. I just don’t do it daily.

Be true to YOU

The fact that I am goofy, geeky, and for some a bit too chatty or offbeat has occasionally led to some folks unfollowing me.  I’m a flibberty gibbet and I get that some folks like it a bit quieter or perhaps don’t want to hear about #geeklove.  It’s all good, yo!  I still converse with those folks.  They just don’t see my occasionally pneumatic post frenzies.

As I mentioned before I don’t obsess about it, but sometimes I notice.  Like today.

Twitter is being a bad little beastie with OAUTH and API issue galore.  The frequency and duration of the pain we all feel has increased signficantly since The Day That Twitter Died.  There have been all sorts of odd happenings including changes in message counts and follower counts, delays in tweet updates in the public stream and the ever-disappearing trending topics (that aren’t actually true trends since Twitter has filters on them but that’s a whole ‘nutha can ‘o tabacky!)

Today Twitter was PMSing again and behaving quite frightfully at times.  As a result I was on the lookout for oddities.   After noticing a random decrease of 4 followers I went on a quest for information.  Nothing.  Hmm. Curiosity peaked as I continued on my journey to discover who unfollowed me.  It turned out that there may have been some suspicious accounts removed, but there was one…one unfollower…who was a real person.

** GASP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH NOES!!!!

I may have to cry now because I am diminished by this injurious action! < /sarcasm>

Yes, I’m being silly.  I’m working on a 2 day sleep-deficit and I’m giddy.  But in all seriousness, this  unfollow caught me by surprise. It’s someone I really like, enjoy conversing with when he is in a tweeting mood, and not only did he unfollow me, he unfollowed @g33kguy!

I thought about it for a bit and grumbled to myself as I tried to figure out what egregious Twitter-Crime was committed by us that necessitated the removal of us from his Twitstream.  After wishing the pox on him (I jest) I thought, you know, we probably annoy the crap out of him.  Or we offended him.  Or, he only followed us in the first place because we goaded him into it (also in jest at the time).  I just wish he would have said, “Hey y’all yammer to much” or “Hey all this talk about love makes me heave” or “You guys aren’t worth my time”.  I totally respect that level of honesty and find it disheartening and frustrating when I don’t know why.  < /nosewrinkle>

Since I know you’ll ask – yes I have dropped off a few streams without explanation.  One posted such offensive content that I was concerned about hitting the filters at the office or having my kids walk up behind me and see it.   Another did something that designers and developers do not tolerate – they lifted an idea from us and used it as their own.  It’s not that the idea was unique.  It’s that there was never a conversation about, “Hey, I know this is your thing, but I’m thinking I’d like to do the same thing. Are we cool?”  My answer would have been 100% yes.  It’s the sneaky crappy way it was handled that chapped me enough to say FINISH!!! (inside joke).  Other than a smattering of unfollows, I love my community noisy, busy and full of color!  So bring on the tweets!

WHEW!!

If you’re still with me after this verbose ignivomous monstrosity, thanks for reading.  No really, thank you!  Hopefully I entertained you a bit or distracted you.  Oohh…shiny ball!

The point of all these letters and squiggles is to make you think by asking you one question comprised of 22 words: Do you follow to increase your count or do you follow because the individual you are following adds value to your Twitstream?

Until next time, chew on that!  I’m out.

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It has been insanely busy in the OGL household lately.  As a result, I am still working on the second article in the Usability vs Creativity series.  Until then, I am submitting this video for your geek enjoyment.

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Geek shirts, wear them proud!

I’ve been called a nerd before and I have always responded, “I’m not a nerd. I am a geek.” To which someone would ask, “What’s the difference?”

Easy.

A Geek is a nerd with social skills. To further back this up, I pulled up the always amusing, but sometimes informative, Urban Dictionary.

Listed below is one of the definitions listed on the website.

GEEK

One of four titles used to classify someone based on their technical and social skills. The other three titles are nerd, dork, and normie.

The difference between the four titles can be easily shown in table form:

Normie ……… Tech Skills (NO) – Social Skills (YES)
Geek …………. Tech Skills (YES) – Social Skills (YES)
Nerd ………….Tech Skills (YES) – Social Skills (NO)
Dork…………. Tech Skills (NO) – Social Skills (NO)

Normie: A normal person. Blah.

Geek: An outwardly normal person who has taken the time to learn technical skills. Geeks have as normal a social life as anyone, and usually the only way to tell if someone is a geek is if they inform you of their skills.

Nerd: A socially awkward person who has learned technical skills due to the spare time they enjoy from being generally neglected. Their technical knowledge then leads normies to neglect them even further, leading to more development of their technical skills, more neglection, etc. This vicious cycle drives them even more into social oblivion.

Dork: A person who, although also socially awkward, doesn’t have the intelligence to fill the void with technical pursuits, like a nerd, and is forced to do mindless activities. Almost always alone. Usually with an XBox. Like playing Halo. All day. Every day. Not even understanding how the Xbox is making the pretty pictures on the screen. Very sad.

So as  you can see, GEEKS rule!

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