The Members Forum

When I signed up for a Twitter account in the summer of 2009 I spent some time thinking about whether or not I should protect my tweets. As a novice Twitter user, I had to decide whether the benefits of protecting my tweets outweighed the drawbacks. Looking back, I do not regret my decision to protect my tweets, and I'll tell you why.

When a person's tweets are protected, all followers of that person need to be approved by that person. This works in some ways the same as approving friends and colleagues on Facebook or LinkedIn. By protecting my tweets, I would be able to fend off spammers and bots on Twitter. As I understand it, bots on Twitter are computer programs that automatically send you an @message if your tweets include certain keywords.

If spammers and bots see any advantage to being able to follow me, I want no part of that. The downside to protecting my tweets is that they are not findable by people who are searching Twitter. My tweets also cannot be easily retweeted using the retweet button on Twitter. However, my tweets can be retweeted via standard copy and paste, which is fine by me. Just because I protect my tweets does not mean I don't want my tweets to be retweeted.

Several friends of mine have tried to convince me that by protecting my tweets I am being antisocial. I see it as quite the opposite. By protecting my tweets I am fending off spammers and enhancing the Twitter experience for others. Every person who follows me is someone I have accepted as a follower. By and large, these tend to be quite thoughtful people working as librarians, educators, journalists, free and open-source software advocates and nonprofit change-makers. If those are the kinds of people you'd like to follow, browse through my followers list to see if you find people you want to follow. My followers list is viewable to any and all – as is the list of people that I myself follow. As you might imagine, there is a quite a large overlap between these two lists, as I tend to follow people who follow me back.

PC World has the details HERE!