Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

For some reason, I’ve been garnering a few followers a week on Twitter lately, which is kind of insane, since my Twitter stream is pretty inane (especially the attempts to be profound). It’s gotten to the point where I have more than 400 followers, which is not to boast (a lot of my friends have many multiples more than that).

But a few months ago I pruned the list of people I follow back to only people I’ve met in person (with a few exceptions), and the number’s hovered around 150 ever since. While I could pretend to be all “Well, that’s the watershed group-size number cited by social network theorists,” really its because many of the people I follow are heavy users and that’s about the size of the information firehose I can drink from without drowning.

While I started to consider it, I won’t set my feed to private because I do like to share links and I have friends who follow my Twitter feed but aren’t actually users themselves (thanks to the RSS feed on my site). And if you really need to get in touch with me — say, about a story idea or a job offer — it’s not like there aren’t lots of other ways to reach me.

So yeah, it’s not that you aren’t different or special or deserving of my attention. If it’s any consolation, there are lots of folks I have met, do follow, and don’t follow me back. Which I agree kinda smarts, but we all have different levels of attention we can give to any one service.