I was a little upset that YAL author, Alyson Noel, wasn’t following me, but, hey, at least she didn’t follow then unfollow. Also, she did respond to one of my @messages, so that made me feel better, I suppose.

I guess if someone like you or @shellterrell or @angelamaiers or @rmbyrne suddenly dropped me, I might be upset, because as you state, we’ve had plenty of interactions.

Getting dropped is sort of like being jilted for no known reason. And here I was thinking once I got married, that sort of craziness would end.

Who knew Twitter could bring so much emotion into our lives?

Social Media holds a significant parallel to real life, and you illustrated that nicely in this post.

-Lee DiGeorge
@MrDigeorge

I’m not sure that I take following or unfollowing as a sign of the strength of my relationships in social spaces, though. For me, the sign of the strength of a digital relationship is more evident in whether someone shows up to leave a comment on my blog or shows up in the chat room of a webinar I’m running.

Those kinds of steps take more of a commitment than following or unfollowing in Twitter.

I get what you’re saying, though: We believe we’re sharing useful content and helping others with every Tweet. When someone chooses not to receive those tweets, it makes us question whether or not the time we put into curating is really useful.

#wondering

#andilikeit

Rock on,
Bill

I think that there is a ‘Twitter-cycle’ of sorts – that you’ve described here (my own take on it is at: http://classroom201x.wordpress.com/teaching-links/twitter-for-educators/) As you follow more and more people – the signal-noise ratio gets more difficult to deal with, and the same thing happens to many of the people you started following at the beginning.

My view is that you just have to manage things to keep it all, well… managable – None of it is personal – and I feel bad unfollowing people – but the sheer volume of information ends up too hard to deal with… I find a lot of people tweet mainly links – which look interesting, but I never end up looking at (and I know, I do the same!) and I don’t tend to interact with them… I do tend to keep unfollowed people on lists, so I can find them at a later date.

The non-reciprocal nature of twitter relationships is one of the things that makes it work – so I’m not too stressed about people not following me – if my tweets are useful/interesting – that’s cool, if not… well never mind, I think people use twitter in different ways and look to get different things from it… you have to see how it works best for you…