Twitter Is Not About Followers

For some time, I have seen a very bad attitude towards Twitter, which is that "If you don't follow me, I'm not going to follow you". I guess these people didn't get the memo that Twitter isn't Facebook. There is no guarantee or even requirement for reciprocal following. That's not where Twitter's strength lies.

Recently, I came across this blog post, sadly retweeted by Social Media promoter Alexandra Samuel (see the tweet), that lists the top ten websites that let you unfollow those who don't follow you back. How this benefits anyone, I have no idea.

What people should be focusing on are two things with their Twitter presence:

1. Find quality people to follow. Really when it comes down to it, the average user stands to gain much more from those they follow versus what they will be sending out or from those who follow them. Rather than unfollowing people who don't follow you, concentrate on following people who provide you with great information you can use. On the same note, if you find people you follow who aren't posting information useful to you, unfollow them. The more tidy your follower list is, the more you will get out of your Twitter account.

2. Send out a quality feed. There are many blog posts and websites that discuss this. The main point is, if you want someone to follow you, you need to give something back -- and simply following them isn't enough. Twitter isn't a popularity contest.

Have fun with Twitter, use it to promote yourself and gain valuable information, but don't make it about followers. If that's your goal, close your Twitter account and head back to the safety of Facebook.

Where Are All The Perl Jobs?

My current job search has been an interesting one, especially when it comes to jobs in one of my more familiar programming languages, Perl.  Four years ago when I was scanning the job boards, Perl jobs were more common and I got hired specifically for that skill.

During the past four years, I went on a number of tangents, so when returning to the job market, I went back to my Perl roots.  Surprise!  I can hardly find a single one.  Everyone's posting for PHP developers.  Even the "P" in LAMP has become PHP.

I did some quick Google searches and found an article from 2008 which did a bunch of job posting comparisons and noticed a few trends.  The charts they use from indeed.com still pull current data, and the trends they showed then are even more pronounced today.

I customized a chart to pull the job postings I'm most interested in, for Perl, Javascript, and PHP developers.

There you have it.  At the start of 2007, Perl and PHP jobs were on par.  Four years later, Perl is where it's always been, and PHP has about five times the volume.

My guess is that Perl is still there, as are the jobs, but they are either so drowned in other postings that they are hard to find, or more likely, developers are found without the need for postings by looking within an organization or by the means of networking.

Looks like I'll be adding PHP to my skills set though, and soon.