Yeah, the days of "Yertle the Turtle" social networking are going to start coming to an end: http://tinyurl.com/3jq5oz - Dawn

Auto follow? No, no, no, bad idea. - Kol Tregaskes

I have it enabled - I think it's broken. - Mona Nomura

You're missing out on potential great follows if you don't auto-follow. It's about who you pay attention to, not who you follow. You should follow everyone who follows you, as a courtesy. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: 100% wrong. - Robert Scoble

It's interesting that he links to my article, but he misses that we also offer auto-unfollow, forcing those unfollows to be removed as they unfollow you. We also offer a blacklist, enabling you to choose who you want it to not follow. I check these regularly and we add the most obvious offenders to a master blacklist that gets applied for everyone. We will also be adding better ways to choose who it auto-follows in the future. It's not a black and white scenario here. - Jesse Stay

And the number one reason you shouldn't.............You're helping spam followers get past protocols! - Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct

We're working to build a service that improves the relationships of those who follow you, not make them worse. - Jesse Stay

Robert: ditto. If you're not willing to take a minute to see if someone is worth following, then you're unlikely to figure out who's worth paying attention to after the fact. - Carter Rabasa

Robert, based on what logic? You don't use DM so it's 100% wrong for you, but the majority of Twitter uses DM. No one can DM you if you don't follow them. You're also missing a great relationship by not following those that are showing interest in you. If it's an issue of avoiding spammers there are ways around that. - Jesse Stay

Mona, what service are you using? SocialToo? Let me know if so and I'll take a look at it. - Jesse Stay

I'm not ready to automate or script anything that is intended to help me map my value networks. - Thomas Knoll

I should also mention there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter. That's why it's simply an option. You can turn it on or off, based on your needs. - Jesse Stay

Word to the wise, learned today: Don't use an auto DM to give me a link to your MLM scheme... I'll immediately unfollow. (Not sure how he made it through my MANUAL check anyway...) - Ben Hedrington

Ben I agree with that - I don't use SocialToo's auto-DM, but I do use it for my @SocialToo account. I don't think it's appropriate for personal accounts, but it is appropriate for business accounts. - Jesse Stay

No, I would never want to autofollow people on Twitter. I think following people as a courtesy is missing the entire point. You follow me because you want to listen to me. It should have nothing to do with whether I'm following you or not. Also, I don't really DM much, I think it's a distraction. - Rahsheen ™

Rahsheen - Agreed. - Ben Hedrington

Rahsheen yes, that's correct, but I want to listen to thousands of people. That's the case for everyone on Twitter. You simply can't feasibly do that. That's why you follow as many as you can, and manage the most important ones. Then you have the opportunity to discover many new people by following their Tweets, noticing interesting posts they may post later on down the road, and now building relationships with them as well. - Jesse Stay

I follow most of the people who follow me, but not all. And I check each profile. - Chris Baskind

Auto-follow is not for me, because of spammers and the type of language some people use. I do not wish to see hatefulness, unsolicited attempts to sell me something, or tons of outright profanity/vulgarity. This doesn't mean I can't be hateful, profane or vulgar, but I have my limits. - MiniMage (FakeLifePerson)

Chris, that's the idea - follow everyone, with exceptions. That can be automated. Why do you check their profile? To verify they're not a spammer. That can be automated as well. - Jesse Stay

I see what you're saying, Jesse, but I don't think everyone wants to listen to everyone. I check each profile. Most of them are crap. That could be a factor of who finds+follows me, but I wouldn't wanna take any chances. I can discover new people by seeing who is talking to who, just like I've found people via FOAF here on FF. - Rahsheen ™

if you focus on quality in who you follow, not quantity, the information feeds make it easier to learn, and engage in conversations that are worth having. If you want "chatter" turn on the TV, or visit a chat room. Autofollows are not for me. - John Bernier

Rahsheen, that's the idea though. Most of that can be automated, then you're checking fewer profiles to verify they aren't spammers. That's where we're trying to go. - Jesse Stay

John, that's what TweetDeck is for - filtering out the non-quality tweets. You still don't want to lose the relationship though. This is all about relationships, not necessarily just information. We're building real-life relationships here - the information will come naturally through that. - Jesse Stay

How can you automate whether someone's Twitter is crap? That seems pretty subjective to me. One person may enjoy following a bunch of self-proclaimed small-busuness experts, another may not. - Rahsheen ™

Rahsheen it's about automating by democratic process, and letting individuals select or deselect based on that. We've got more coming around this - keep watching. - Jesse Stay

That's the rub, people use twitter for different reasons...I like it for quality, not quantity of information, and depth of relationships, not just how much info, and how many followers. Auto follow does not encourage real relationships, rather, it sounds like it's meant to simply build a large following. - John Bernier

John, you're right - autofollow is not for everyone. I some times get over 100 followers per day - I simply don't have time to go through each of those profiles to identify them. So for me, it's about finding the best way to listen to each of those I can. It's for guys like Guy Kawasaki with 35,000+ followers, or Britney Spears or Starbucks. - Jesse Stay

Cool. Here's case in point: my @bernierjohn profile was just followed by a user who follows 200+ people, and already has 79 followers. How many posts does this user have. Zero. Profile includes a link to a garbage website. How is that adding value? - John Bernier

We were talking about this at our tweetup tonight. Somewhere down the line, people got this misconception that it was rude to not follow back. That isn't the case at all. I know, personally, I'm more concerned with who I'm following than who is following me. It shouldn't be about "pleasing" those who follow you. Everyone should be trying to make their listening/conversational experience that much better. - Shawn Farner

John, that's why we're finding new and better ways to automate spammer tracking so it won't follow people like that if you don't want it to. There are all kinds of intelligent ways of stopping it from following spammers. - Jesse Stay

I don't think Britney or Starbucks is listening...lol - Rahsheen ™

Here's my question? What is google doing with there own twitter account? Nothing, no updates or anything but people still follow? What a waste!! - Paul

Rahsheen, again, it's about building relationships. It's enabling accounts like that to build relationships they couldn't have before. Whether they have the time to listen or not. - Jesse Stay

Jesse, just curious, what are you using to populate your spammer blacklist? - Mike Doeff

Mike, right now it's each user populating that themselves. We have some techniques we're putting together right now to take advantage of all these lists individual users are creating to give you better suggestions. It's about allowing each individual to have their own control over what they define as "spammer" - Jesse Stay

exactly Jesse, if they are not listening, they are not building anything other than a big follower list. - John Bernier

John, I disagree. I now am much more interested in Britney Spears, or Shaq, or MC Hammer than I used to be due to them being on Twitter and showing the smallest token of interest in me. Count how many times you see "OMG Shaq just followed me!" on Twitter. - Jesse Stay

Someone following me does not imply a relationship beyond the fact that they're following me. - Rahsheen ™

Those guys are really using it for marketing to the masses, let's not kid ourselves. Go into Briney's feed, how many @replies does she have with her fans (from Britney herself, not her PR people). None. That's not building a relationship, that's PR. And for those people that are excited about getting a follow-back...good for them, I look at it like they have just opted into an email distribution list, but it is definately not a relationship. - John Bernier

Shaq is funny, I'll give him that, but again, it's all PR. He's retiring soon, what a great way to keep his personal brand in the mainstream. - John Bernier

I guess it all depends on what you define a relationship. I think it's different on a business vs. personal level. - Jesse Stay

Auto follow is a cheap way to look like you care, auto unfollow sends the wrong message as well. i.e. "I will only follow you as long as you follow me." I follow people and never have an expectation that they should follow me. I can still @reply to them. - Christian Burns

Christian, again, this all depends if you're an individual, or a business, and how many people follow you. - Jesse Stay

@jessestay Right now I have 1209 followers. I am following 826. I had to give up looking into each person that followed me and I don't want to follow just because the followed me. even now I would start to try and unfollow some because its too much of a firehose. I do think its a good idea for a business or politician to try and follow as many as follow them. - Christian Burns

Also, it depends on individual objectives. I believe we have the opportunity to experiment with entirely new ways of augmented cognition, but it will require giving up some ego. I need to learn to not be offended if everyone in the universe does not see me as a person and let go of guilt of the impossibility of seeing everyone else as persons. This perhaps sounds dehumanizing at first, but we will continue to explore this in augmented cognition room, for those perhaps interested. - michael silverton

@silverton Yea, like giving up control over how others use a service, even if it goes against how it was designed to be used. Patterns emerge but we cant let others bully us into how they see it. Conversation and debate are ok but there are those that wish everything was cut and dry. - Christian Burns

@JesseStay I am using tweetdeck and love the email summery for the day, but wish that it gave more cotext of those that follow and unfollow during the day. Like 1. how long have they been on twitter, 2. how long have they followed me before unfollowing me, 3. how many people follow them, 4. how many people they follow - Christian Burns

Christian, I'm hoping to expand some of that. - Jesse Stay

@christianburns http://peoplebrowsr.com/ has a lot of that. fairly insane actually. Kind of tweetdeck meets cooliris meets the firehose. - michael silverton

@JesseStay I really like how mrtweet does it, http://mrtweet.net/report... I am blow away by how slick they do it over there - Christian Burns

@LouisGray Thanks for the link to my blog post - Ramkarthik

@JesseStay I wrote the post which is linked here and I'm glad you answered some of the questions. I don't know how I forgot to add that auto unfollow option to the post. I'll edit the post now. But that's not the only reason why I wrote the article. Sometimes I feel that people should not follow everyone who follows them. Not all followers are good twitterers. Some post only links to products or blog posts in their tweet. That's the main reason why I don't suggest to use autofollow. Thanks for your reply. - Ramkarthik

@JesseStay Thought this was cool, from my SocialToo email today "117 people unfollowed you yesterday:" Without SocialToo I would not have had any idea who these accounts were. Twitter just cleared up a ton of spammer accounts as well as some "others" http://tinyurl.com/4oz8bu - Christian Burns

Christian, ah - is that what happened? About time - they had all these suspended accounts that you had no way of deleting. I was trying to figure out why all the unfollows. Cool thing is that with SocialToo I could tell exactly what time it happened. - Jesse Stay

I think it's interesting the Scoble says Jesse is 100% wrong, but told Guy Kawasaki 100% opposite. "When I first started on Twitter, Robert Scoble told me to follow everyone who followed me. 'But why, Robert, would I follow everyone like that?' The answer is that it’s courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and everyone who follows them will see this—which is more exposure for you." http://is.gd/6VZ6 (Tip #4) - Matt Albiniak