Brandice posted an interesting writeup explaining her ‘policy’ for following people on twitter. I figure I might as well write mine down:

Why I follow you

I personally know you

Only 2 of my real world friends use twitter on a regular basis, @Keylynn and @Kevlar557. There’s a third, but the poor sap can’t afford the text messaging. I know them in real life, so this is really where Twitter shines.

You are interesting

As Brandice said, if you are someone funny, I’m probably going to follow you. My main mode of twitter usage is through my phone, even though its likely to crash (for some reason, my phone’s software dev’s never considered that “@” might not be used in an email address). I like having little tidbits of interestingness coming in to brighten up my day.

As you can see, my rationales are much simpler. I use twitter almost exclusively through my cellphone, so I’m not always seeing every update from everyone that I follow. If I follow you, it doesn’t mean I read what you send. There is only a small, select number people I permit to send me sms notifications. Only once in a great blue moon do I login to the twitter website and check my normal timeline. Then I’ll poke around and see if anyone got any more interesting since I last checked.

The only reason I might un-follow you is if you stop being interesting to me.

To sum things up, I follow people I like. If I don’t care about what you have to say, you won’t get followed.