Robert Scoble is Fake Following

I had an interesting conversation on Twitter yesterday with my friend Robert Scoble. I like Robert a lot and we also enjoy debating together, so there are no hard feelings on both sides (also since Michael Arrington is offline I have to fight with someone else and Robert is a quality twitter fight buddy!). Except yesterday was different. Robert called me as he always generally do when we start fighting and I have never seen him so upset. Robert says I can fight but not misquote him, fair enough I did not mean to misquote him.

Here is my version of the story. Robert was to my knowledge the very first person I know who asked Twitter to add the automated autofollowing of everybody who follows him. I liked the rationale behind it. I am genuinely interested in anybody caring enough to follow me and I want to learn about her or him. Robert influenced me and I asked the same, other friends such as Jason Calacanis also asked Twitter and added it. Robert then turned it off around 20,000 followers and turned it back on recently. I turned it off a few days ago, Jason did the same. I should not have turned it on and I should have realized it was a bad idea earlier.

I think none of us had any idea we would end up following tens of thousands of people that made our feeds and direct messages become a catastrophy, I have already discussed that. What we were discussing yesterday is the principle itself to autofollow which sure, makes all your followers happier as you tell them you care, but disturbs me because you simply cannot pretend honestly being able to follow tens of thousands of people.

Robert argues "YES WE CAN" but I call bull on that. Robert only follows really 150 people, hand picked, and he uses Friendfeed for that. He does not follow 60,000 people on Twitter regardless of any tools (thank you for some of you bringing this, but try loading tens of thousands on following in these tools supporting user groups and you will see). Robert gives the impression of following them (like I did) answering many @replies when these people quote his username and he gets them with search. He does not have to "really" follow them to listen like this, just get the @replies back.

Fake following makes no sense to me now that the numbers are so high because you are "pretending" you are following someone to make him happy in a fake way or more because you know that autofollowing helps you get many more followers artificially mainly due to robots. For me it's like cheating to everyone. I think Robert is so upset because he actually agrees with me and is really authentic. So Robert turn this thing off.

Why you would start fake following (and I do not recommend you to)
1- make your fans artificially happy by giving them an impression of fake attention
2- artificially increase your number of followers as following everyone helps robots follow you more
3- pretending you are listening to everyone when it is just impossible with 10,000s of people
4- looking good online
5- making yourself happy by giving you the fake impression you are so good at listening

Oh and before I forget Robert says "he is defined by who follows him" (unlike I quoted him), I just want to make him happy to restore his quote. Apologies Robert if I misquoted you. I still think autofollowing helping you Robert getting many fake automated followers (sometimes really worse, people with really bad intentions, etc) does not define you very well and I am also sure you agree. I know you remove some of these manually, but there is no way you can find them all with 60,000 following.

I really want to learn about everybody following me, but I don't want to pretend I am giving anybody my attention when it's not the case. There are many other ways to learn to know about my new friends. In any case, I am very easy to reach, my mail is on my blog, I read my @replies, and I am manually adding a few people daily, that I can say how I know them and/or why I follow them.