An Open Letter To New Twitter Followers

Dear New_Twitter_Follower,

Thank you very much for following my updates on twitter! I'm flattered and inspired by your interest in what I have to say.

Please know that I've read your twitter profile and your last 20 (or 40) twitter updates. If I felt your tweets had a high signal to noise ratio, were relevant to my interests, and your publish rate would not drown out other people in my information stream, I've followed you back. If you have a FriendFeed account, I'm subscribed to you there too; otherwise I've created you as an imaginary friend. (I prefer to do everything through FriendFeed.)

If I have not followed you back on twitter, please don't take my decision personally. I am just trying to keep my own information stream well diversified and down to a manageable flow rate. As such, I just can't follow as many people as I might like to.

I may, in fact, be subscribed to you in other ways. I've also looked up your name on various search engines, followed the link in your twitter profile (if you have one), and tried to find blogs or other publications made by you. I've read them, and if I felt they were informative I've subscribed to them.

Thank you again for following me on twitter, and I hope you find my updates useful!

Sincerely,

Ian Stewart