Yesterday I had a mom-date with mi madre and we saw “He’s Just Not That Into You”. No I’m not some whiney girl who wants to get a date or get married. In fact, when I read the book, I actually thought… So… I’m a guy! Good news if I ever want to blow off a chick.
Anyhow, there’s this line from Mary (Drew Barrymore) who you probably remember from the commercials that goes something like:
“I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”
So when I watched the movie, I thought “oh ha ha, that’s funny”. But today as I’m doing the very rare dance of looking at who I’m following and who has unfollowed me on Twitter, I found myself very hurt by losing a few Twitter friends I made in my early Twitter days.
I don’t even use the services that send you an email every day letting you know who unfollowed you and why. I don’t know WHO those services benefit, honestly. Even if you don’t know the people following you, why do you want a reminder that what you have to say is not even interesting enough to be one line in an RSS feed?
I (embarrassingly enough) actually had a moment where I thought… “Why Amanda, do you even waste your time on these crappy sites with these fairweather friends?”
Then I thought… Hello. It’s Twitter.
Honestly, I never unfollow someone unless they’ve unfollowed me first. On the other hand, I don’t follow anyone unless they’ve responded to a tweet or DM’d me or made some type of conversation.
I expect the same of everyone, but to follow someone and unfollow someone takes effort. This goes the same for any other portal.. Myspace, Facebook, [insert your network of choice].
So I’ve gone ahead and set up TweetLater to automatically unfollow my unfollowers. If you have a sore spot for Twitter rejection, you might find it useful to keep your Twitter follower list nice and clean too 
I’m telling you, I’m so thankful not to be in the dating scene, ESPECIALLY the social media dating scene. If I get all jaded about a few Twitter unfollows, there’s no hope for me in that circle.
Then would it be cliche to say that when I do unfollow people, it’s because “it’s not you, it’s me”?
100% of the people I have unfollowed simply Tweet too much for my ability to keep up. Some people send msgs upon msgs, over and over, and for me, I need quality not quantity. Plain and simple. I have a couple hundred people I follow, and I don’t think I can handle much more without unfollowing some along the way.
If it’s that important I stay up to date with them, I’ll find a different way to follow them: blog, FB, whatever.
Just my two cents… love the site!