Recently in Social Media Category

I follow about half as many people on Twitter as follow me. Given the extremely small numbers in both categories, that's not a declaration that merits any significant reaction. Frankly, I'm not too interested in increasing either number, and I've occasionally taken steps to decrease one of those number by unfollowing people.

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I view following someone as extending an invitation for that person to step through the doorway and into my home - and I have certain standards of behavior I expect for any guest in my home, just as I would expect to conform to a host's standards when I visit him or her.

So, here are my "rules" (OK, they're actually guidelines, but I do enforce them pretty rigorously) for deciding when to unfollow someone, in 140 characters or less.

1. If you're uninteresting, I'm not interested. If I haven't click on one of your links in 3 months, or you haven't made me laugh/think, adios.
   
   
2. If you routinely use profanity, you obviously aren't a good steward of your 140 characters. Buy a thesaurus, then try again.
   
   
3. I have a few hot buttons. You can push 1 with impunity, but hit more than that & you're history. What are they? You don't need to know*.
   
   
4. This doesn't happen often, but I unfollowed someone for using a vulgarity to refer to a woman. It's all about respect & they lost mine.
   
   
5. People who routinely ignore the 140 character rule & write until they use up their space & expect me to go looking for the rest. Buh-bye.
   
   
6. If I haven't subscribed to your blog's RSS feed, why do you think I'm interested in reading your tweets advertising posts? Hint: I'm not.
   

OK, I think those cover the most egregious violations of my personal guidelines. If I once followed you but I'm not any longer, it's because you crossed one or more of these lines. Doesn't make you a bad person, just not someone to whom I want to dedicate a portion of my monitor's real estate.

*I'm not trying to be obnoxious. You shouldn't be altering your natural style or personal beliefs to conform to mine. I wouldn't do that for you.

The Twitterverse is abuzz about Woofer, the tongue-in-cheek "macroblogging" service that so closely resembles Twitter as to make IP lawyers walk funny, and which requires a minimum of 1,400 characters (vs. Twitter's 140 character maximum).

Most of the woofs thus far seem to be either randomly typed characters, or passages from famous books, like Moby Dick or the Bible. This tells me that people just aren't trying, because 1,400 characters is child's play for a blogger. For example, the first two paragraphs of this post (including this sentence) accounts for 655 characters, or 46.8% of what's necessary to woof it. (And, yes, I did have to iterate the character count a couple of times so I could get the actual numbers using Word's Properties feature. And if you include the rest of this paragraph, you're up to 60%.)

Now, I realized that actual writing has been rather rare at the Gazette lately, as I've tended to substitute one picture for, well, you know...a bunch of words. And I am beginning to worry a bit that Twitter is siphoning off what little creativity I had in the first place to apply to this here blog-like thing. So perhaps it's good that Woofer has come along, if only as a reminder that, sometimes, 140 characters isn't enough.

Or, it's a good reminder that using more than 140 characters for some things is a huge waste of pixels.

With that, I've achieved woofability. So, adieu.