Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Twitter Friends

If you are on Twitter, then chances are that you already know about Friend or Follow. If you do, bear with me while I talk a little about that, but a little bit more about my new love: Twitter. Even though I just hit 5,000 tweets last week, I'm still claiming the Twitter newbie title while I can. There is just still so much that is new. Aside from the general coolness of Friend or Follow, here's the new thing I learned this week: I could totally be the crazy facebook tattoo girl of Twitter. Well, not really, in that I'm totally not a tattoo girl, pain girl, needles girl, or anything too permanent girl. But other than I could totally be the crazy facebook tattoo girl of Twitter.

In case you don't know about the crazy facebook tattoo lady, all you need to know is that some lady was reported to have tattooed the faces of her 152 facebook friends onto her arm. Turns out, it was just a hoax. But the point is, that when I saw the story for the first time, I thought: Really? (Re-read that with the voice of Seth Meyers if you will.) Really? Your whole arm? I'll bet you hide most of those "friends" from your fb news feed, too.

But then this week my husband was reading my tweets, as he is wont to do. (He's not on Twitter, he just reads my tweets. So it's kinda like having a stalker, but he's my husband, so it's kinda sweet.) Someone had suggested in a tweet I go to friendorfollow.com for some reason or another. I was probably either apologizing for my poor follow-back skills or whining about how Twitter just randomly unfollows people "for" you and how would I even know if Twitter had unfollowed someone I really liked following? So as my husband was reading my recent tweets, he says to me, "You haven't been to Friend or Follow? It's kinda cool." So when your non-tweeting husband is in the know about a twitter-tool website and you're not, you of course, have to stop what you're doing and go directly to that site. And OMG! I love this site. It's super simple, but so cool!

So what does all that have to do with me becoming the crazy tattoo girl of Twitter. Well, I'm getting there. Geez. Patience, people.

For those of you who don't know what Friend or Follow does, it basically just breaks your Twitter peeps into three groups, which I will show you.

Following: These are the people whom you follow, but who don't follow you. These are mine.


There's really nothing too shocking here. Except, of course, that @AlecBaldwin hasn't followed me back yet. That's a little weird.

Then there are your fans: people who follow you, but you don't follow them. Again, these are mine:


I could't believe this when I saw it. I know I am rather horrible about checking out (and hence following back) new followers. I usually just wait until they talk to me first. Then I follow back. But this was a large number. 116 to be exact. I decided I'll visit here regularly and choose some interesting looking avatars to investigate for potential follow back.(But if you actually want me to follow you, it's really best if you just talk to me.)

And finally, there are your friends: people whom you follow and who follow you back. These are my Twitter friends:


Now if you don't follow me on Twitter, this is just a group of 235 random avatars. If you do follow me, you probably recognize some of these faces.  But when I saw this group of pictures, I just smiled. Really smiled. These really are my Twitter friends. I sent out my very first tweet on February 26, 2011. Since then, not only have I acquired this many Twitter friends, but I look at those faces (and cartoon faces and even some pictures of just random stuff **ahem shoes**), and I see the faces of the people who keep me company, make me laugh, share their lives, ask me about my day, send me eHugs after a crummy day, and just all around make me love Twitter. It's not Twitter that I love though, it's you.

So at the risk of sounding like a drunk college kid, I love you, man!

But no, I am not tattooing your faces on my arm.