In the last few days I’ve gotten follow requests on twitter: one from a local coffee shop - their one and only update advertising their soup of the day, and the other from some random person with 26 mostly-personal updates and a few interacting with other users I don’t know. Since I didn’t know the random person, I looked at their profile (ultimately their website) and slapped that label on their forehead.

This random person references a SEO (search engine optimization) startup. My handy-dandy Twitter Classify User greasemonkey script identifies them both as spammers (a spammer being someone with at least a 5 to 1 following to followers ratio).

Now that I’ve classified the two users as profit-seeking folks, why am I inclined to accept the invite from the local coffee shop trying to sell their cream of mushroom soup and deny the invite from the startup trying to sell me a better spot on Google’s search results?

I guess I can be fairly sure that a local coffee shop isn’t trying to amass followers so they can use them to leverage some ad campaign for whoever pays them. The SEO startup, I’m not so sure. I followed the link to their site and a couple of the articles on the front page even tell you how to script sending unsolicited follow requests to large numbers of twitter users without having to do a lot of manual clicking. In fact, since I started writing this article they’re following an additional 200 users.

I accepted the coffee shop request and declined the SEO startup.

For me, twitter is about social networking. I spend so much time traveling or shackled to a home office that it’s important to me to keep in touch with my friends & family and this is a convenient way to do it. Beyond that, I don’t want to read updates from companies unless I’m involved with them somehow (i.e., @comcastcares, @twhirl, and @pranzo).

In the end, it’s a tool like any other and you have to decide how you’re going to use it. I’ve decided.