Friday, July 31, 2009

The Follow Friday Legacy and Will Smith

Follow Friday, or #FF, is a curious thing I've come to discover. It's a ritual, well, it's almost a responsibility we have. A responsibility to our favourite people, or to those that we respect. We do it each Friday, over and over, usually the same messages, and all the same people RT you, then some spambots RT them. My #FF list keeps growing, I have about 12 tweets worth of people now, and recently I started hearing negativity that I was spamming the airways, dumping everyone I follow out there. Well I follow about 1333 people, and don't tweet that many, just those who've made the effort to interact with me, or who are very interesting.

I've told everyone that I will space out my #FF tweets from now on, to not spam out any users who still use the website or who don't have that many friends. It got me thinking today, as the same pattern repeats, that this is just like out of the Will Smith movie I Am Legend.

Every day he would go out to the docks and broadcast his pleas, his hopes, his offerings, like a lighthouse to ships sailing nearby. It's like a radio broadcast that never shuts down, but just repeats. We don't have to keep doing it, those who follow us already know, in fact most of the community already knows, they've been seeing it for some time now, so why do we continue?

Because like those beacons that repeat, we stand as a sign to newcomers, a direction that they can follow...Literally. Those who sail into our waters will not get lost, they will not crash on the rocks, they will find safe port and the shelter of a community. Twitter is built in such a way that these beacons are necessary as the stream keeps flowing, and if we don't retransmit, our messages will be carried off with the tide and into obscurity. We can never predict when new people will come and join us, so we carry on in a tried tradition, a right of passage to grant opportunity to those looking to join the tribe, knowing that one day they can pass this legacy onto those who were just like them, lost in this new turbulent ocean.

No comments:

Post a Comment