“I enjoyed it,” he says in his blog. “I thought that if anybody cared enough to follow me I should also follow them back in return and read my ‘personal firehose’ when I had some free time, instead of watching TV for example. Actually I never watch TV but you get the idea! I learnt a lot by following all my community and it has been a really enjoyable experience.”

But auto-respond tools, which send out generic “thanks for following! I can’t wait to tweet with you! Come to my site!” direct messages started to get on Le Meur’s nerves. As the popularity of these tools increased, it became nearly impossible for Le Meur to use his direct messages effectively.

Le Meur calls it “heavy robot attack,” and it sounds dramatic until you imagine the blitzkrieg resulting from the number of followers continuously added to his following list.

These auto-direct messages are not new. But they do seem to be becoming more popular. The reasoning for using them is beyond me. An automated message immediately says to me, “I’m too lazy to really get to know you.”

I’ll admit that I have 552 pending requests from people following me on Twitter right now. But I would rather browse their profiles as time allows and, if I send them a note, personalizing it based on their bio and recent tweets. Twitter is about community after all, and getting to know one another. Why should you look at my website if I didn’t even bother to personalize a message to you?

It’s spamming and I can’t think of a worse way to start a relationship.

But was that the only thing that prompted Le Meur to unfollow almost everyone?

“Following or friending thousands of friends or everybody is so 2009 [sic] and @scobleizer -ish,” Le Meur said in a tweet late last night in response to talk about his massive unfollowing on Twitter. “In 2009, we want quality not quantity.”

It goes back to the discussion that seems to have taken over in many social media circles in the past couple of months.

Blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who follows 69,304 people on Twitter, did not miss the shot at him, either. He immediately joined the discussion.

“I use tools so that I can follow both small groups and big groups,” Scoble told Le Meur in a tweet. “Friendfeed’s lists, for instance, or TweetDeck’s groups. Try it!”

But even the grouping feature of TweetDeck, a microblogging platform that competes with Seesmic’s Twhirl wasn’t enough for Le Meur to keep up with his 23,000 followers.

“I used to believe what you said,” Le Meur responded. “I was autofollowing too, this is all bullshit and you know it.”

He pointed out that Scoble himself had stopped using the auto-follow script on Twitter.

“You need to reboot yourself,” Le Meur added. “10,000s of ‘real’ following and friends are so 2008. Get over it, it is just passe, over, finished.”

He and Scoble took the discussion to the telephone. Suddenly, Scoble wasn’t so sure about his tens of thousands of followers anymore. He commented in a tweet: “On the phone @loic makes a lot of sense. Following doesn’t matter now that we have search.twitter.com and friendfeed.”

And so the “unfollow everyone” movement was born. It’s a misnomer—Loic Le Meur is still following 161 people. But you get the picture.

Scoble immediately opened up the discussion on FriendFeed, which allows for lengthier responses than the standard 140 characters of Twitter.

During the discussion, which received nearly 200 comments, artist and blogger Pete Gilbert brought up a good point about Twhirl: “Loic’s company makes a Twitter client. Surely he should build tools into that client to make the overload problem more manageable and certainly not try to set a trend of ‘hey it’s cool to unfollow lots of people now.’ That sort of sends the wrong message to people about your company and it’s thinking.”

He’s right, as mentioned, Le Meur uses the desktop microblogging client Twhirl, which was acquired by Seesmic in early 2008. How his actions will affect user perception of Twhirl remains to be seen.

For what it’s worth, in his blog post about his decision to unfollow people, Le Meur made a commitment to figuring out a way to solve the DM spam problem for Twhirl users. He also assured followers Twhirl was working hard on the filter function in a tweet.

“I am confident we will find a solution,” he says. “Until then, I will remain with a small following list that I will grow one by one daily and remove anybody attacking me again with a robot.”

As of the publishing of this post, Robert Scoble has not followed suit in unfollowing everyone.

What do you think–is massive unfollowing the way to solve the problem?

Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”