Thoughts on padlocks

This is just a quick one. It's something that really bugs me and I've just figured out why. When someone starts following either me or Fabrica on Twitter and it's someone I'm not already following I always go to check them out. And I get really wound up when I see that little padlock symbol denoting the fact that they have protected their tweets and that if you want to follow them you'll need to make a request. You may have a very good reason for doing it, I don't know and honestly, I don't really care. My immediate reaction has always been that I'm not interested in following you on a personal or organisational level. I've just worked out why that is. It seems totally against the spirit of Twitter which for me has always been about connecting with people that you know, people you don't know but who are interested in similar things, people that make you laugh, people that are interesting for whatever reason. You can follow them and they can choose to follow you back or not, they can even block you if they want and vice versa. It's all about that openness that opportunity to build a network. Facebook serves the primary function of being a network for just your friends which is fine. Maybe I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face and missing out on the opportunity to follow some interesting people but until that little padlock disappears I'm not going to do it.