Twitter Follow Friday

Twitter is a free social networking, micro-blogging, online service that is used by people all over the world to communicate ideas and information. If you don't know what Twitter is or why you might want to use it, skip down to the list of resources at the bottom of this post. There's a lot of information around about Twitter so I am not going to talk about the service itself here.

How Do You Know Who To Follow?

Social networks are all about, well … social networking! On Twitter, just as in life, personal introductions mean more than randomly picking a name from a directory listing. Most people have groups of friends, where common interests are the glue that binds. That happens in online social networks too. If your friend associates with someone who shares interests with you, or a zany sense of humour, or indeed anything that would endear them to you as someone you might want to know, or whose advice you would value, chances are your friend would introduce you.

Back in January, 2009, Micah Baldwin decided to introduce some of his friends to others in his social network and posted the message below:

Micah can tell you what happened from there. Follow Friday has taken off across the twitterverse and now, every week, you can find tweets using the #followfriday hash tag as people recommend others in their networks.

I'm doing #followfriday differently

I love the concept of #followfriday but have noticed a problem - I am in New Zealand, which is in the UTC+13 time zone. Many of my followers and people that I am following are in different time zones. And sometimes 140 characters is just not enough to properly introduce a person.

Every Friday, I will be posting my "Follow Friday" introductions on my blog. These will always be introductions to people I interact with, people I enjoy hearing from, who inform and delight me, and who I would enjoy chatting with over coffee in real life.

Look out for the first in my #followfriday series next week as I introduce you to some wonderful people and tell you why I think they are worth following.

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