Oh look...more rules...

Maybe I have been on the Internet too long. For example, I remember when Mosaic was launched. I remember reading about this great new protocol called http and a markup language called html. Heck, I remember using Archie, Veronica, gopher, and WAIS long before anyone had even considered using the term search engine much less Google.

Back then, it was pretty simple. Email was restricted to straight ASCII text and it was assumed that your signature would be no more than four lines long and you would, out of courtesy, delete it if your message was less than that. In those days, bandwidth, what there was of it, was slow, expensive and in some cases unstable. People would gently chide you if you TALKED IN ALL CAPITALS in your email or if you made some other faux pas. Occasionally the chiding was not so gentle and more than a few of the experts would occasionally suggest your RTFM before you sent or did something stupid again.

Fast forward to today. I received, via Twitter a link to yet another etiquette maven, this one on the topic of the same twitter. You know you are in for a lecture when it starts out like this:

Look, I don’t want to tell anyone how Twitter should be used

To be fair, the author is telling you the rules under which the author will drop you from the author's august list of followers. However, given the way Twitter works, it begs the question - if the individual you are following violates your rules, why are you following them in the first place?

To me, it seems very silly to have a set of guidelines that you are going to enforce when you can simply choose not to follow the individual in the first place. I do it all the time. I have a number of people that follow my feeds that I do not in turn follow because I do not see the value in following them. It really is pretty simple and would have saved you hours in coming up with your list.

The key here is this. Twitter rules, like IM rules and email rules are, for the most part, balderdash. And at the end of the day, if you do not like it, you can always unplug. All of this great technology can be turned off.