It seems to me that there are several types of accounts/people that might follow you on Twitter.
- “twiends” have with similar interests to yours and you may wish to reciprocate by following them too.
- “twollowers” have a legitimate interest in what you have to say but you have no interest in following what they have to say.
- “twollectors” aim appears to be to follow as many people as they can with no apparent regard for commonality of interests. You probably don’t want to follow them.
- “twammers” act like “twollectors” but almost every one of their tweets contain links to the same sort of sites that can be found linked in spam e-mails. You definitely don’t want to follow these.
“twollectors” and “twammers” are likely to feature on The Twitter Blacklist, which may have a bearing on your decision to block them or not. If you are a Firefox and Greasemonkey user there is even a Twitter Blacklist script that displays a nice big red banner at the top of a “twacklisted” user’s page.
The question is; which of these do you block? I have previously always blocked “twammers” and sometimes blocked “twollectors”. The question is whether there is any advantage to the Twitter community as a whole for them to be blocked. If you don’t follow them their updates are not seen on your profile page, but they still appear in your list of followers. Twitter says that blocking someone has the following effect.
- You will no longer show up in the blocked person’s list of friends.
- Your updates won’t show up on the blocked person’s profile page.
- The blocked person will not be able to add you as a friend.
I suppose that there may be some value to your reputation in not being associated with them, in which case you won’t want to appear in their list of friends and not have your updates appear on their profile page. But is there any tangible value to them if you do appear on their list of friends or you updates are seen on their profile page?
Update (2008-05-01)
First tweets below found with SUMMIZE.
Posted in Thoughts
Tagged blacklist, block, firefox, greasemonkey, spam, spammer, twacklist, twammer, tweet, twiend, twiktionary, twitter, twollector, twollower
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