Twitter's "Follow Friday" gets its own website
"Follow Friday" has become one of the most popular social conventions on Twitter. Users post the usernames of some people they want to recommend for their friends to follow, along with the #followfriday hashtag. It's a good way to find some new people to follow who might be relevant to your interests or part of your wider social circle. Now, some Twitter users have collected data from #followfriday tweets on a website called FollowFridays.com, that shows rankings of the most endorsed users each week, and lets you log in to send your own #followfriday picks.FollowFridays.com bills itself as the official #followfriday site. I don't know the backstory behind its "official" status, but I can tell you that it's a pretty neat idea. It's easy to miss Follow Friday tweets, especially when you follow a lot of people, and this site lets you see who's gotten the most endorsements, and who the biggest #followfriday namedroppers are. Follow Friday isn't something I really get into myself, and I miss the days when it was less formal -- I think the tradeoff for a site that quantifies this stuff is that it can turn into a competition -- but it's often a better way to find people on Twitter than just looking at toplists and rankings that are crowded with popular users you either already know or don't really care about.
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Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsToddApr 10th 2009 9:14AM
Lame "Follow Fridays" was started by PR people...the same vain, superficial people that just use Twitter to accumulate followers but never read their tweets.
micahApr 10th 2009 9:35PM
Todd, you are completely wrong.
I started FollowFridays.com and had a hand in getting #followfriday off the ground. Here is my post about it: http://learntoduck.com/micah/follow-friday.
When #followfriday began, it was a great way for people to find other people to follow based on trusted recommendations from their friends. Since then, it has exploded and become a million other things, with a million other sites that really dont do what #followfriday should be all about: trusted recommendations.
So, I got with two friends: @strebel who designed the site and @justsignal who built the #followfriday tracker, and put it all together on FollowFridays.com. I called it the "official" site, because I was involved, and it was the only site that did exactly was #followfriday was supposed to do, provide trusted recommendations.
The top recommended is based on the data from the tracker (and some help from my friend Scott who built http://topfollowfriday.com) the featured are folks who we have selected, or helped defray the cost of the site, and the top endorsers are folks that I really liked how they endorsed. Seriously. Thats it.
Read the posts on the site, and it tells you everything about who we are, and what the site is all about.
Jay, thanks for the post!
Jash SayaniApr 12th 2009 4:11PM
Wow! All #followfriday on one page !!
@JashSayani
Anuj SethApr 14th 2009 8:52AM
There are several apps related to #FollowFriday that have been developed.
Have a look at http://twitdom.com/tag/followfriday for such tools.
BethApr 14th 2009 9:41AM
I'm so glad I found this post. I am fairly new to Twitter, and had seen the hashtag #followfriday, but I wasn't 100% sure the meaning behind it .
I appreciate your description of Follow Friday, and the link to the new website.
Thanks for posting.
Beth
@bpvorsight
www.vorsight.com
PatrickApr 23rd 2009 10:16PM
Here is what you should really be doing instread of follow Friday:
http://patrickallmond.com/2009/03/14/my-take-on-the-whole-followfriday-meme/
JogmatigJun 19th 2009 1:46AM
I think viral follow will get you the most reliable result. I never see something like this before on twitter but it works and it's FREE. Check it out
http://tinyurl.com/19KAllHuman