My Twitter Refollow Policy & Other Odds and Ends

Hard on the heels of @RayBeckerman‘s Twitter refollow policy, I’ve decided to pen my own. Twitter is a great tool for spreading information in short bursts but its been hampered by the large amount of marketing, self-promotion, bots, and adult-content promoters. The fact is I have a finite amount of time per day and any extra time spent in one area means making a sacrifice somewhere else. As it is, I’m slow to respond to most people (my apologies) and have resorted to scheduling my tweets for the day either the night before or in the morning. Anyway, here are my rules (apologies to Ray for stealing most of them) on how to not be refollowed:

  1. Your Twitter account is primarily about selling products (teeth whitening, car insurance, real estate, SEO, etc.), promoting yourself, promoting your business, promoting your products, or promoting your religion (with the expectation that I become a convert).
  2. Your Twitter account is primarily used for company PR that manned by an employee or an automated bot. I don’t have a problem if you’re providing another means for customers to provide feedback or to help use your business services but if you’re advertising then I’m not interested. If you SPAM me (adult-content promoters especially) then I’ll report you to @SPAM so you’re account is terminated.
  3. You want to be my savior, life coach, or show me the path to spiritual redemption.
  4. A majority of your tweets come from a client called “API” (meaning you’re a bot), you steal other people’s tweets in an attempt to make your account look legitimate, or you are trying to make money by allowing business to advertise to your followers. We call this SPAM.
  5. You follow my account with multiple fake accounts with the same basic naming rules (i.e. firstname_lastnameXXX where XXX is a set of numbers) in the hopes of amassing a large following. I do not auto-refollow.
  6. You don’t have a real Twitter picture of your face, you don’t link to a blog or a homepage that you run or have contributed to, or your description is generic. If I can’t identify that you are a real person then chances are I won’t be following you.
  7. I’m not interested in adult-content. If your picture is not something I’d feel comfortable showing to my 5 year old cousin then I won’t follow you. If a majority of links on your page are to an adult site then again I won’t be following you.
  8. Your account has tons and tons of #followfriday (#ff) tweets with nothing more than a list of people’s @ nicknames. I’m not interested in sorting through such tweets. Giving your readers a recommendation for a person is just as important as to why you’ve suggested them. This is why #followfriday was created. Also, please don’t retweet another person’s #ff tweet. It’s tacky.
  9. You tweet frequently about how to make money, get more followers, or achieve as much success as you. I’m South Asian so (like most South Asians) my parents will serve in that role in some way for a long time whether I ask for it or not. Love you mom and dad!
  10. Your account has only a couple of tweets but you’re following several hundred (or thousand) people and are slowly collecting followers (aka disproportionate follow/followers ratio). Chances are you’re a bot or a company planning on spamming people. (Thanks to @plasticmadness for this rule. She’s someone I follow on Twitter.)
  11. You follow a hit-and-run policy where you follow a ton of people, collect followers, and then unfollow everyone following at some later point to make yourself look like a popular celeb with a very high follow/followers ratio.

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August 26, 2009 | Filed Under General | 4 Comments 

In Their Own Words: The NHS Rebuttal to the Associated Press (AP)

Update (8.14.2009 – 12:45am Pacific Time):I just received an email from a press officer with the Department of Health Media Centre who has informed me that their “press notice distribution system doesn’t allow us to just send notices and statements on specific issues. And we really do only respond to media queries. We have a public inquiry line if you need regular updates.” Instead, their current focus on dealing with the American press is through The Foreign Office “working with the Embassy in Washington to contact foreign media.” This is a very unfortunate development as the furor being expressed over the NHS comments has largely been driven by social media sites like Twitter and blogs. If you find this post useful then I’d ask you to leave a comment so I can try to email them again in the hopes of getting a policy change enacted. – Hisham

I’m a big fan of the idea behind the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. To this end I’ve been very shocked by the mischaracterizations and half-truths being spread in the United States media by conservatives against Obama’s health care reform push. While reading an Associated Press (AP) article titled “UK health system hits back at US critics” on Google’s news portal, I came across this passage:
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August 13, 2009 | Filed Under Medicine | 7 Comments 

Time Magazine: “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin”

Journalist John Cloud takes an in-depth look at our society’s current health problem from the angle of exercise and diet in this week’s Time article titled Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin. Notice I didn’t write weight problem. The difference is that ideal weight perceptions have fluctuated randomly in cultures throughout the ages and, more importantly, the ideal body weight for each individual differs based on their specific genetics and environment. If a person wants to become healthier then its probably a better idea to focus more on exercise. If the same person wants to lose weight then they’ll have to focus a lot more on diet. Doing both together is ideal.

The point is people shouldn’t be exercising for the goal of losing weight but instead to become healthier. Sadly, an increase in health is more of a subjective target than the objective and quantifiable numerical value given to weight. If a person loses weight because of it then that’s just an added benefit. I hope this article begins to tackle the “wisdom of the mob” that believes an exercise program is only as effective as the number of pounds shed on a bathroom scale.

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin
by John Cloud

I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn’t all the exercise wiping it out?

It’s a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government’s definition. Yes, it’s entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don’t. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight? …

Time Magazine

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August 7, 2009 | Filed Under Medicine | 1 Comment 

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