I’ve just started using it and very impressive it is. But one thing puzzles me. Why would complete strangers choose to Follow me? I’ve had about half a dozen in the last week. Is this the Twitter version of spam?
Within minutes of signing up, I was being followed by someone named “britnetfuxvids”, who had a rather graphic photo as their icon. Shortly after that, someone named after a UK dating site joined up as well. As flattering as that was, sadly yes, I suspect it was spam. I haven’t had any others, though.
I have, on occasion, followed strangers with twitter, and since very few people I know in real life are on twitter, nearly everyone who follows me is a stranger. The strangers I follow are usually people I’ve noticed through people I already follow, or people I’ve browsed using the public timeline. If you don’t know many people who use twitter, that’s pretty much the only way to follow/get followed.
I have, though, been followed by people who aren’t interested at all in my tweets and are following me only to get me to follow them because they are selling something. I usually glance at their profile, and if their tweets are only about the product they are selling, I don’t follow them back. Some of them do have interesting tweets nonetheless, so I follow them, although sometimes if they get too annoying I unfollow.