Please read this before sending me a "friend" request or you'll almost certainly be denied.

Here's the original post from August 2007, and here's the May 2008 update, both left here for historical reasons. Now that Twitter has finally reworked how private acocunts, things are slightly different.

Basically, I can let you follow me without having to follow you, just like people with public Twitter accounts have always been able to do. Plus, the iPhone Twitterrific application means I can check in with messages without having to turn SMS on. That makes following more people a little easier when I'm oot and aboot.

But my basic rule remains the same: I tweet personal information, like when I'm out of the office, when I'm going to bed, and that kind of thing. If I don't know you, there's very little chance I'm comfortable sharing those details with you, and I will not accept your follow request.

Yes, I can let more people follow me now without Twitter overload because I'm not required to read their updates to let them read mine. (I just unfollowed NBC News because whoever has control of that Twitter account hooked it up to a standard NBC News RSS feed, and I don't need Twitter-style interruptions with stuff that isn't breaking news of program-interrupting importance, like a pedestrian analysis of Al Qaeda's budget or that Benazir Bhutto's widower will run for president in Pakistan.) But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable sharing the kind of tweets I send with people I don't know.

I'm sorry if I use Twitter differently than you, and if that offends you in some strange way. But that's how I use it, and I limit my updates to people I actually know and with whom I'm comfortable sharing those kinds of details. My way is not necessarily better than your way, but it is my way, and that's how I use my Twitter account.

Yes, I Twitter.

For a while, I couldn't figure out why I kept getting "friend" (or now "follower") requests, not only from people I hadn't told about the tweeter, but from people I didn't even know. I finally figured out that a few people on my list have public lists and several dozen followers each. Gruber alone had over 2600 followers as of this post's original date of 2007.08.21, and as of the 2008.05.15 update, has over 10,000 followers.

When people who follow me reply to something I tweeted using the "@name" syntax, a lot of people see it. This took a while to figure out because at the time, IconFactory's almost-too-minimalist Twitterific did not display "reply" tweets from people I follow unless they're addressed to people I also follow. Now Twitter itself largely does the same thing, though they seem to be working actively on how to make it better.

So, as an example, I didn't see this tweet from Gruber to Steven Frank—Twitterrific never displayed it to me. This doesn't really bother me too much, but I hadn't expected it at the time.

Anyway, that's how people see my name, and I get follower requests, but I generally turn them down. I mostly use the tweeter-thing to keep friends and family up-to-date on what's going on with me, since they worry about me and not entirely without reason. It's a kind of persistent message that makes a lot of sense for me to send to family and friends rather than E-mail (too formal, not checked often enough), but more flexible than a phone call (they'll see it when they look instead of having to answer the phone or listen to a message). I use it to let my folks know when I'm going to bed or getting up, when I'm headed out for errands, when interesting things happen—and yeah, sometimes for Mac-related stuff.

But because it's mostly a personal thing for me, from what I'm eating to where I'm going, I don't want to share it with the entire world—just with family and friends, the people who I could call and yell at if I wanted to and they wouldn't block my number. Basically, the people with whom I'd also share my cell phone number. I keep that information private because that way, when the cell phone rings, I know it's not a telemarketer or salesman or up-seller or "help you win government contracts now!" call.

Those have drained so much time since the heart failure diagnosis that when I'm in the office, I now basically don't answer the main phone at all and, in fact, have it rigged so that it only rings for a very small group of callers. There have been a couple of failures of this the past few days, perhaps because an 8-hour power outage on Sunday morning might have affected the screening mechanism, but otherwise it's been working well. This is one way things are getting back on track around here, and I'm not going to repeat it with my cell phone number and have it ringing at all hours of the day and night with people who just want to waste my time.

So, yeah, it's nothing personal, but unless I'm comfortable enough with you to give you my cell phone number or tell you when I'm going to sleep or leaving the building, I'm not very likely to add you to my Twitter list. We're considering doing a separate Twitter account for MDJ and MWJ-related news, but that's not in the Top Ten priority list right now (the mailing list is back, and back in a way that doesn't easily translate to Twitter access). Not everything that can be public must be public, even in the age of The Internet Tubes.

Update: So, basically, it's been about nine months since I posted that, and this post is my "Web site" on the Twitter page, so people who don't follow me and are scoping me out should see it as a link and, I hope, read it.

That doesn't seem to happen very often. I still get dozens of follower requests, and I deny almost all of them, because I'm not really comfortable telling everyone when I'm going out, when I'm going to sleep, etc.

But with Twitter, it's even worse than it seems. Since I keep my updates "private," I must follow you for you to see my updates at all. Unfortunately, if I follow you, I see all of your updates whether I want to or not. I can control whether your updates go to my cell phone or not, but I can't stop them from showing up on the home page or in Twitterrific.

This is a major deal-breaker for me in a lot of cases. By nature, Twitter is interrupting: you're supposed to stop and look at the messages as they arrive. If you get 10 new messages every three minutes, you'll never get anything else done. Plus, I want Twitter to be interrupting. If my family or close friends send an update, I want to see it immediately.

But, you know, God bless Bynkii and I love him dearly, but one day last year, he was debugging something and sent 40 tweets in an hour, so many that he crashed my iPhone when I turned it on. (I'd been out-of-range for a while, and when I got back in range, I needed to look at a Web page, but I couldn't: I got a new modal dialog box for each incoming SMS about his debugging, and couldn't even get to the settings to try to turn it off. After about 10 mins of failing to get anything else done on the phone, it simply crashed and restarted.)

This was not his fault. It's a bad design in Twitter—by conflating "following" and "followers" for people with private updates, it means I must follow you if you want to see anything I tweet. If my updates were public, you could follow me but I wouldn't have to follow you. No such luck in the world of private updates: there's no way to tell Twitter "Let Bynkii read my updates but I don't want to see his." It's everything or nothing.

Because of this, I had to prune the Twitter list to remove the most prolific tweeters. It's just a rough start to my day on my schedule to get to the office and find 60-100 mostly-irrelevant tweets, since the Twitter API (as seen in Twitterrific) only allows it to display the 20 most recent tweets. Most days I still have to go to the Twitter site and read about one page (or less) of catch-up tweets, but that's manageable. Three to six pages is not.

So, for the past six months, I've basically denied every follower request unless I recognize (or think I recognize) the name, and then I just let it sit there, not wanting to be rude by denying requests, but not wanting to get more tweets either because it's hard enough to get things done around here. Today I gave up on that and cleared out all the requests, denying them all. And there were some people I'm quite fond of in that list, but not people I need to hear from 6X per day. (About a third of my Twitter list are family and friends who never update, but I keep them on there in case they do, because there's no impact.)

From now on, if you're not someone I'm likely to call at an odd moment just to chat, I'm probably not going to accept your follow request even if I know you. This is not rudeness, it's just self-defense to keep the incoming information flow manageable. I already have about 3000 news items and 200 E-mail messages in an average day; I can't afford to add 300 new tweets to that as well.

So, yeah, trying to keep interruptions to a minimum makes me seem like a jerk. I apologize. I screen calls, too, and have aggressive junk mail filtering on the server for the same reasons. And I still may have to prune back my follow list somewhat to reduce the messages, especially from the people who have thousands and thousands of followers. Once a tweeter gets to that point, it seems his tweets become less like communication and more like performance art. That's valid and all that, but I don't need to be interrupted by performance art.

I hope Twitter fixes the problem so that private updaters have the same privileges as public ones in choosing both whose messages they get and who receives their own messages. Until then, it's gonna have to be this way. The whole thing's irrelevant when Twitter isn't working right, and that seems to be the direction of the platform anyway, so maybe it won't be such a big deal soon.