I've never been much into the whole social networking thing, but I received an alert on DP that someone was following me... Should I be scared, worried, intrigued, excited? It's a bit of a new thing for me, never knew I was that interesting =)
No worries ,I have 155 followers. What it means is that someone appreciates your posts and thinks of you as an asset to the site. Becoming a follower is a metaphorical friendly pat on the back. It's also an invitation to do business and to make contact. Whenever anyone decides to follow me I do likewise. P.S. Make that 156 followers, just got a new one, thanks Amelia!
To me, it means that someone is interested in reading my posts. I am glad that the new forum platform has the news feed, there was no such thing when DP was running on vBulletin (the "friend concept" is useless if there is no way to see your "friends'" posts like on Twitter).
Actually my friendship list has always been useful to me. I preuse my list whenever I need any pinch hit article writers, as we get swamped here. Also when I need tech advice, and also I put friends together as to business opportunities. With friendship comes benifits. You can ask many of the people on my friendship list wether or not they have made any $$$ by me or because of me. And it has worked both ways as they have referred clients to me. Friendship=business.
In the past with vBulletin, the following system was pretty pointless and just a way to show who you like. Now I actually see some good functionality in it. For example: Being alerted when someone you follow starts a new thread. It should increase the amount of quality communication and encourage people to create quality threats knowing those who follow them will get alerted.