How to use Twitter

I’ve had a peaceful, quiet little twitter account since 2006.  Then one day, on a lark, I threw up @danshapiro up during a talk that I was giving about RC airplanes. The talk got boingboinged, and my inbox flooded with random folks following me.  (Hi!)  Ever since, I’ve had a couple of new follows a day.  Ashton, here I come.

So here’s the (blurry) algorithm I use to decide who to follow:

If you're a friend, or your followers outnumber your follows, I'll look at your page. If you don't tweet too often and at least a third of your tweets are interesting (and private exchanges with someone do not qualify), then I follow you.

So that’s my decision tree.

What’s yours?

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