The true measure of a fellow twitter user is if you can @ThanetStar or @LordMatt and get a reply.

Then you know that you can talk whenever you wish even if he’s a fish blogger and you are a woodwork blogger. The daily tweets are of no interest but the occasional message… that’s different.

“So if you follow someone, and they don’t follow you back (you get sent an email to say X is following you), then it appears, sort of, that they don’t like or respect you very much.”

Or, you cou;d consider how you Twitter, as perhaps that person likes and respects you plenty, but just can’t cope with the amount you put out there, or how many @‘s you do, or what you happen to talk about on Twitter.

I think it’s time we seperated out this whole “I like you, I’ll follow you on Twitter” idea and substitute it with “I’m followed on Twitter because what I say on Twitter is interesting to these people following me”.

I would never think that of the 500+ people following me that they all “liked & respected” me. They just perhaps find what I say sometimes amusing — more often than not or they’d ditch me. And if they did, I wouldn’t loose any sleep over it — just as I don’t when I unfollow both friends and just random Twitterers because their feed has become of less interest to me than others I follow.