Hello reader!

It’s been a while since last I troubled the keys of the old laptop. However, I have been gifted over two weeks off from work for the Christmas holidays. I was meant to finish tomorrow, but thanks to this dreaded lurgy, it appears my last day at work was in fact last Friday. Which in essence sounds wonderful, but the truth is, I’d have rather stuck with the original plan and not spend four solid days being felled by a nefarious virus.

The missus has been crocked by a virus too, amid a plethora of other lady related infections and so forth… I haven’t pried too much, as is the case with most chaps, a woman’s plumbing is entirely her own business I’m sure. Despite my diseased state, I am on hand to assist my good lady in getting better.

Still, the missus’s illness woes have meant that for the first time in aaages, I have managed to get direct access to the laptop. So, ‘every silver cloud…’ as they say.

Last night, whilst pissing about on Twitter @profanityswan was keeping me entertained with his #MiracleTrain3 tweets. During which he was followed by another Tweetbot @Potato1, to which he announced ‘ALL OF HER TWEETS ARE AMAZING’.

Needless to say, I was simultaneously amused and intrigued, so I popped over to see what @Potato1 had been Tweeting about. There were two tweets. Painfully generic in nature, as most Tweetbot Tweets tend to, be in the interest of purporting to be an actual person.

What also struck me about this two tweet tweetbot, was that it had over 500 followers. I couldn’t quite get my head around this and assumed that most of the numbers were likely to be made up of other tweetbots and the like. However, as I trawled through the list of followers, it soon became apparent that real people were on there.

I couldn’t quite get my head around why anyone wants to follow someone/thing on Twitter that has Tweeted twice with a three month gap between each Tweet. I decided that the people upon this list must have been easy pray for follower desperate Twittery types. So, being a kick up the arse from that magic 100 followers figure, I decided to take matters into my own hands (rather than tweeting at a celebrity for help in this regard) and went on a #FollowBack Frenzy. I think I may have doubled the number of people I followed in the space of twenty minutes.

When I returned to Twitter today, I was surprised to discover that I’d had a one in four success rate in relation to the follows I’d set up last night. My Twitter feed was a nightmare, largely composed of all the strangers I’d followed from the night before. It really is beyond my comprehension as to how people cope with feeds that go beyond 100 let alone thousands plus.

I’ve suffered the pain of being exposed to terrible grammar, awful spelling and worse, txt spk. If I want that kind of thing, I’ll pop across to Facebook. There’s now a rich mixture of all sorts of shit in my feed that I wouldn’t have willingly selected to be there. Much of it appears to be racist, sexist or just plain stupid (but not stupid in a good way). Many of my favourite Twittists were lost in the melee, so I was forced to create a list to keep my favourites close to hand.

I don’t know if it’s a British thing, or just a personal preference, but after having indiscriminately followed all these people, I feel a little obliged to wait for at least seven days before dropping them. I think it’s because I’ve seen this tactic deployed on me and because I never bite and #FollowBack they’ve usually disappeared the next day.

I think my difficulty is that I want Twitter to be a personal experience. I’ve been signed up to Twitter for over two years, but only really started using it six months ago. In those six months I had largely, carefully selected around 75 Twittists to follow, many of whom appealed to my values, beliefs and most importantly, my sense of humour. I like to interact and to banter with people.

What I discovered, and really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, is that some people actually collect followers and hitting number of follower targets is seemingly their sole purpose for being on there. To me, this seems to defeat the very purpose of what Twitter is for and is just a little more than distasteful. Each to their own I suppose.

However, from this random act of buggering about following people, I appear to have inadvertently made some new friends to play with, so it’s not all bad. Perhaps I’ll just go on a #FollowBackFrenzy on the lists of people I know and get on well with and see what occurs from there.

Then again, perhaps I’ll just go back to my tried and tested method of gradually gathering in like minded people and just enjoying the craic. Playing the numbers game is quite frankly for sheeple.