I love Twitter.  I’m addicted to it.  I tweet from my laptop all day at work.  I tweet from my desktop PC when I get home at night.  I tweet from my iPhone while I’m at traffic lights, standing in line in the grocery store and waiting in the doctor’s office.  I tweet when I’m in the bathroom and when I’m watching Battlestar Galactica.  So, yeah, I love to tweet.    And that’s saying a lot.  I usually don’t get into any of this social networking stuff.  MySpace is an abomination and Facebook is becoming more and like MySpace every day.  LinkedIn seems to be holding its own as a gathering of professionals but I fear for its long-term viability (fear may not be the right word).

But I’m getting a little irked with the direction I see Twitter going.  A micro-blogging mechanism for friends and people with common interests to send a maximum of 140 characters is what Twitter is all about.  But now, more and more people are starting to follow me that have no interest in me other than getting me to follow them in return.  It’s the expected courtesy; you follow me so I follow you.  It would be rude for me not to reciprocate, right?  But they don’t follow me because they like what I have to say.  They follow me because if they can con me into following them in return they can then begin to spam me with their veiled  (or not so veiled) advertisements.  In the past 24 hours I’ve had several people start to follow me that don’t know me and don’t have any interest in what I tweet about.  The most recent is a guy trying to peddle skateboards and skateboarding gear.  Uh, what was it I said in one of my tweets that made you think that I was interested in your wares?  Poser.

It’s too bad, really.  There is no place to hide from spammers.  There is a fine line between getting people to know what you do and just being a pest.

So today I am coining a new term:  spitter;  a twitter spammer.  I think I’m the first to use it.