preamble: I’m borrowing the term “Push My Follow” from a podcast with the same name. It’s a pretty rocking show, and if you’re interested in the community side of social media, you should listen to the show.

What does it mean when you follow someone on Twitter? Does it imply a one way relationship or has social media conditioned us to expect two way relationships on sites like Twitter?

On Twitter, when you want to get updates from someone, you push the “Follow” button. It means that you will receive updates from that person in your timeline. On Facebook and MySpace, you make friend requests. On those networks, the wording implies a two way relationship is requested. Making the transition from these friend based networks to Twitter, some people assume that they should be reciprocating these relationships as they would elsewhere. I recently spoke with Stephanie Agresta at a panel discussion in Manhattan and her policy is to follow everyone who followers her. Some people like to have the proverbial fire hose turned on to get the pulse of what is going on through the collective conscious of the internet. Robert Scoble does this. Then there are people that don’t follow anyone, but use their fame or status to push information. Author Seth Godin does this and Hillary Clinton also did this. We will ignore these people for this discussion s they aren’t participating in the community, just adding noise.

There’s a third group of people who selectively follow people. It’s not just the people who follow them, but only people they know or people that they know or people that contribute to the conversation. I’m one of these people. Very clearly in my bio on Twitter I state that if you don’t contact me or contribute to my conversations, I will not follow you. The way to send a public message someone is to put the character “@” in front of their handle. So my bio states “If you do not @robblatt me, I will not follow you”. It’s also a way of weeding out the people who are paying attention vs the people who are navigating through the site with blinders on.

I also make sure that if I’m going to follow someone that I don’t know but appears to be of interest, I’ll introduce myself to let them know who I am or I’ll comment on something that they’ve recently said. This is how I was introduced to internet dude extraordinaire Phil Campbell. A few weeks before PodCamp Boston 3, I was interested in talking to an iPhone developer for something work related and asked the community that I’m a part of on on Twitter if anyone knew iPhone developers. Lo and behold, Dana knew Phil and gave me a quick introduction. I sent a message to @philcampbell in 140 characters saying who I was and a quick hello and that was all I needed to build a small relationship. I met Phil at PodCamp Boston 3, and that made the real world introduction a bit easier.

Now let’s look at the people who choose to follow everyone who follow them. I have no evidence besides anecdotal to think that this is a carry over from sites like Facebook or MySpace, but it makes sense because these were the networks that conditioned us and taught was social networking was. There’s nothing wrong about following people in this fashion, and I started out doing this until I wasn’t able to process the amount of information that was incoming when I checked the service. It was overload for me, and perhaps it is for them too, but when I realized that Twitter could be a tool for mass communication is the moment I “cut to the fat” so to speak.

But Twitter isn’t the only service using the follow model. Plurk uses follow and fan. You can follow people’s updates and you can become fans of people. Seesmic allows you to follow people’s videos. It’s a sea change because the people who are creating these services are realizing that I’m not actually friends with Merlin Mann, I just want to read the messages that he sends out. I’m not friends with Fake Ira Glass, but I follow him.

How do you use the follow feature on social networking sites? Maybe you do something I haven’t mentioned yet. This will probably become multi post conversation, so leave your comments.

I also think that the next episode of Geek is Chic will be on this subject thanks to my ramblings on Twitter. View that tweet.