Soundly established, with a solid foundation of real followers, there is great potential for one to harvest so much from their investment of time and personality. It annoys me to no end when people who obviously don’t get it jump into the pool and start handing out links. I think they do this more often because so many people *do* auto-follow. Why would you want to automatically follow anyone? It serves no purpose other than building someone else’s list of followers without thought or conscience.

Yes, there are probably reasons for doing so that someone like me, with my less than 200 followers, doesn’t quite grasp, but to use an example you regularly use to talk about social media (which I really like, by the way), if you’re walking down the street, it might be awesome to have people out there who just automatically follow you wherever you go, hanging on your every word. Everyone wants to be loved/popular, so everyone is probably in favor of people following them, but letting the other shoe drop, would you just up and follow anyone down the street? How do you know they aren’t marching to a World Cup-style riot, complete with hooliganism?

Just my take on auto-follow. I’m still fortunate that I can use Twitterfox and enjoy real conversations with my friends on a daily basis, while picking up new and interesting items and information along the way. I wouldn’t want to dilute that for the sake of Twitter “power.” (At least, not yet, anyway.)