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If you landed here from my Twitter page be sure to visit my main page at http://kevininscoe.com to learn more about me.

My personal Twitter is @kevininscoe.

My location twitter (if your really bored or family who needs to know where I am) is @whereiskevin.

A.K.A. My Twitter Manifesto.

Also known as "Hey I followed you why don't you follow me?"

First of all let me say obviously we all have different interests and more importantly attention spans.

Please don't take it personal if:

1. I don't follow you when you followed (or mentioned me).
2. If I did follow you for a while but then un-followed (and may re-follow again later).
3. I did not reply to your DM or your reply (right away). I am a father of three, have a full time job (along with several others) and just generally a busy guy. I probably just missed it or I maybe be thinking about a response.

Twitter is this great social networking tool that like all social situations (especially when it's not face-to-face) misunderstandings and assumptions come into play.

I tend to use my "public face" Twitter (http://twitter.com/kevininscoe) for these basic functions even though it can be used for a myriad of ways.

1. To chat with family, friends and co-workers.
2. To get acquainted with new friends with similar interests.
3. To alert my associates and family of my status changes that they need to know about such as where I am, if I am leaving or have arrived at work and if I am on travel, etc... To this end I use Brightkite (http://brightkite.com/people/kevininscoe) a lot.
4. Receive alerts from my home brew alert and information systems like Nagios or @orlandotraffic.
5. To publish updates on what interests me at the moment and what I am working on that I think is sufficient interest to my aforementioned family, friends and associates.
6. To learn what is going in my circle and finally...
7. To follow others not in the above groups who I find interesting or working on similar projects to me. Note that I do not expect them to necessarily follow me back.

Sadly Twitter or more importantly the clients built for it on platforms I actually use that I have seen to date provide filtering or the ability to silence streams temporarily. So to that end... I may un-follow you and it may only be temporary. My Twitter stream is important to me and just like email if you clog up my stream with useless bits I can't relate to I will un-follow you.

This used to go without saying however folks like Leo Laporte and others play silly games to garner the most followers and if numbers are your only game I am not interested.

Also it used to be well understood that you received an email from Twitter when someone followed you but not when someone stopped following you. However tools like Qwitter have sprung up so now it becomes (painfully?) obvious when someone "quits you".

The bottom line: Tweets like "I am standing at the bus stop" may be interesting to your circle but not necessarily to me especially if you give blow by blow more often than every four hours.

Last but not least is spam or what I call "twam" "Twitter Spam".

If all you are trying to do is to get me to look at you, your blog or web site or worse this is some kind of misguided marketing scheme well you needn't bother that's an immediate turn off.

Obvious signs of spam are a low (or even zero) follower to follow count or just links and no conversation going on.

I won't follow you in this case but I find most who follow me in this manner are simply bots anyway and don't even bother to read this text.

It used to be polite to automatically follow anyone who followed you which I used to dutifully do in the early days but no more.

It got so bad for a while I protected my updates. I realized though this was cutting me off from the outside world so once again I am getting tons of twam. But that's they way it is in the social network world.

Anyway now that is said and out there enjoy the discussion!

Kevin's Public Wiki maintained and created by Kevin P. Inscoe is licensed under a
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Back to my web site - http://kevininscoe.com