One of my Twitter friends surprised me this morning. Let me show you what he tweeted:

I’m not going to name the guy — I’m not here to bash anyone. The problem he suffers from is common enough: he’s following too stinkin’ many people! See that? “1,861 following”!

There are three kinds of Twitter members:

1. those who follow everyone who follows them and only unfollow the really annoying ones (many people consider this common courtesy)
2. those who only follow people they want to listen to (makes sense — if you follow too many people, you really can’t keep up with any of them — where’s the courtesy in that?)
3. those who follow thousands of random people, hoping they’re in the first group, and never intending to read anything their friends tweet (these are the “spammers” of Twitter — just trying to build a list to market to)

My guess is that my friend is in group 1. What concerns me is that he just labeled most of those people he’s following as “noise”. Sure, it’s probably true, since he’s really not interested in what they’re saying. But wouldn’t it be more genuine and make more sense to just unfollow them than to use TweetDeck to filter them out?