The idea behind FollowFriday is simple.  Every Friday, Twitter users recommend a few of their friends for others to follow.  They simply tweet (i.e., post a short message to Twitter) with the names of their recommended friends along with the hash tag #followfriday which serves to tag the tweet, making it easy for others to find.

In the old days—like two or three months ago, which is two or three Twitter eons—I found FollowFriday to be generally quite useful.  A typical tweet might look something like this:

Follow @bfrench and @BudGibson for Web 2.0 insights; @AAObserver to keep tabs on Ann Arbor happenings. #followfriday

Now that is a genuinely useful tweet.  That tweet provides some insight into why (or why not) you might want to follow the recommended people.

Unfortunately, now, most FollowFriday tweets look more like this:

@JohnZajaros @xemanhdep @rossmulcahy @ArticlesFYI @dmahutchinson @lingokid @aaronaiken @faseidl @campaignstace #followfriday

This has two problems:

1. Who cares?
2. Who notices?

Who cares?

Without annotation of any kind, all I know about a long list of recommendations is that the person doing the recommendation follows these people (presumably).  But, in most cases, I don't want to follow everyone that every one of my friends follows.  I mean, what's the point.  If that were a good thing, why not just follow the public timeline?

I want to follow people that are interesting—to me.  Maybe one of my friends, who I follow because she is really funny and a good rational thinker, follows an expert in dog grooming because she is also really into dog grooming.  I am not into dog grooming and, while the dog groomer may share wonderful insights into dog grooming techniques, I'm simply not interested in that.

Who notices?

The idea behind FollowFriday is to broadcast your (hopefully annotated) recommendations to all of your followers.  But in an effort to jam as many non-annotated recommendations as possible into Twitter's 140 character limit, people are inadvertently  creating "@" replies that limit who sees the tweet in the first place.

Let me explain.

In Twitter, tweets are generally seen by everyone that follows you.  The exception is when you begin a tweet with an @-sign and a username (as in the second tweet example above.)  Such tweets are called "@ replies" (or "at replies") and they are intended to be a direct reply to someone.  Such tweets are seen only by the recipient and by anyone that follows both the sender and the recipient.  So, for example, the second tweet above is not seen by all of the sender's followers.

How to fix FollowFriday

To use an in-vogue term, FollowFriday has jumped the shark.  But its not too late to turn things around and make FollowFriday useful again, if people follow a few very simple FollowFriday guidelines:

1. Do not start a FollowFriday tweet with an @-sign.
2. Give a brief annotation for each recommended person.
3. Include the #followfriday hash tag.

A simple means of accomplishing both points 1 and 3 is to start the tweet with #followfriday.

Point 2 means that you can only recommend a few people in a single tweet but the tweet will actually be useful.  If you really want to recommend more people, simply use multiple tweets.

So, now that you know how to make a good FollowFriday tweet, you can help this idea to un-jump the shark by issuing useful FollowFriday tweets.