The Follow Friday phenomenon on Twitter is a crowd-driven meme that provides thousands of recommendations each Friday. Like TwitPic and URL shortening services, this trend has generated a life of its own within (and outside) the Twittersphere. All you have to do is follow someone suggested by those you already follow and there is a reasonable chance you will like their content too. It is a great big karmic love-in for tweeps. However, given Twitter’s limitations (which are also its strengths in many ways), the reasoning behind many Follow Friday recommendations can be hard to work out. This post is my attempt at explaining which tweeps I love following, and why. I hope you find some interesting tweeps behind the Tweets.

Julie Posetti
Julie Posetti is an Australian academic who professes her interest in “social media and journalism; public broadcasting [and] political journalism” amongst others, on her Twitter profile and elsewhere. Recently, she found herself at the middle of the so-called twitdef scandal where she was threatened with legal action by the editor of The Australian newspaper for supposedly defamatory tweets. I’ve mostly found Posetti’s tweets to be honest, thoughtful and insightful. Though I’ve not met Posetti, we have had short Twitter conversations. Jason Wilson, one of Posetti’s colleagues at the University of Canberra, is a former lecturer of mine. Wilson would have made this list himself had he not famously retired from Twitter in 2010.

Mister Shuffles
Mr Shuffles is the Twitter account of an Asian elephant born at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo. The tweets are exactly what I imagine a baby elephant would say if it it spoke English. They are funny and laced with the right balance of inquisitivity and playfulness to suggest a young child. I suspect Mister Shuffles is a fake account given the name is not actually the one given to the elephant by the zoo and it is not linked to from their website. Nonetheless, the observational humour and general cuteness of this fake account is worthy of followers.

Fake Penny Wong and Fake Andrew Bolt
Twitter has given rise to a new breed of parodist in the Twitter fake. As with traditional comedians, some of the parodists are quite lame and don’t warrant even a link from this post. Others, however, are uproariously funny. Provided you aren’t easily offended or put off by foul language, the tweets of Fake Penny Wong and Fake Andrew Bolt provide glorious skewering of their targets, Australia’s Minister for Finance and a blustery columnist respectively. The Bolt account is especially great, given his reaction to its existence. For more on Bolt, see once again the work of Jason Wilson, who has had a running battle with him for several years.

Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd
Rudd himself is a dry and boring but sometimes delightfully colourful politician. His tweets are much of the same. It may be oddly voyeuristic to enjoy Rudd’s tweets of life with his dogs, wife and children but they seem to give a genuine oversight into the man. Australians have had an endless fascination with Rudd and his personality, so his tweets are compulsory reading for many, especially when he was Prime Minister. Interestingly, Rudd was one of the first Australian pollies to sign his tweets off with either ‘KRudd’ or ‘Staff’, signifying whether they were from the man himself or a lackey. It is a habit since adopted by others.

Jonathan Holmes
Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch, a program dedicated to watching the watchdogs. Holmes’s tweets are not particularly enthralling. Rather, this old-fashioned journalist is more attuned to the long of his craft and he plies it superbly on The Drum. Whatever Holmes writes, I read. It is thoughtful, thought-provoking and usually spot on. It is also laced with dry wit and biting humour as necessary.