There are times when I wonder about the state of the world, and then there are times, I simply getting annoyed over the little things. Now I understand people whom actively use twitter would love to have followers and have people who find them interesting want to follow their tweets for a variety of reasons.

Of course we all hate spam bots and we detest getting stupid tweets from said bots, but then there’s interesting people whom would be under normal circumstances great to follow and even interact with via Twitter. However something occurs that for whatever reason annoys the crap out of me.

Someone follows you and you check them out and hey they’re not a spam bot, but someone interesting so you follow them back, a bit of time passes and then suddenly they un-followed you for no obvious reason and yet you’re still following them along with a pant load of other people whom were probably drawn in much the same way.

Now I can understand filtering out people whom annoy, offend, or otherwise just aren’t interesting anymore, but to unfollow people en masse just to have a nice high follower count (or so it would appear) just seems kind of cheap. Celebrities get away with it for obvious reasons as they’re usually not even the ones doing the tweeting, or they don’t want to be flooded with the silly toils of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. But when it comes to the regular folks whom probably just like having a large following without any real interaction with them, or better still without being interesting in any way do it, it’s no different than the folks on social networking sites who make friends with everyone but doesn’t speak to anyone.

I generally have the policy of following back people who follow me, unless they either turn out to be spam bots, complete idiots, or just plan don’t tweet for several months. It’s partly because it’s the polite thing to do, and also because I enjoy interacting with people from all over the place in many different industries.

What kicked off this particular rant was going through my twitter account today and discovered a whole slew of people I’d been following no longer seem to be following me and while it might be that I’m just not that interesting, it could also be they don’t want to appear to be uncool by following more than they are being followed.

I’ll never really know the case and maybe I just don’t want to, no belay that, I do want to know, who wouldn’t? I’d love to know if I some how pissed someone off, or if I’m simply not that interesting anymore. It’d make me more aware of how I might have done such a thing, or it might aid me in being more interesting to those whom do follow me.

I’m quite sure others feel the same way, so what’s the moral of this rant? If you’re just out to get followers then either be really interesting, or build them the old fashioned way by communicating with people. If you’re just in it for the popularity, then you either need to star in some A-list movies, or grow up and get passed the grade school mentality.

Networking etiquette dictates that to build successful connections you need to be open and interactive with those connections, not just have a long list of names of people you really have no interest in.

At least that’s my understanding of things; feel free to correct me in the comments!