Admit or not, we all have our little secret methods of deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter or not. Luckily, the guys over at TechCrunch shed some light on the Golden Ratio theory of following users on Twitter.

The Golden Ratio, or the followers versus following theory is something that most Twitter power users seem to use. When you first join Twitter, you don’t look twice into the details of the person who is following you. But after your followers number increases, things tend to change.

The Twitter timeline tends to get a little polluted with irrelevant tweets after you have more than one or two hundred followers. Not everything in your stream is relevant to you anymore and a filtering system must come into place. That’s where the Golden Ratio theory becomes handy.

Dirty little secrets: deciding who to follow on Twitter might not be the easiest thing to do, but the Golden Ratio method could really help. | Photo: Andy Beez on Flickr

The Golden Ratio method is quite simple: the less people someone follows and the more people are following that person, the user becomes more follow-worthy.

Even though it might not sound as the fairest method to judge whether to follow someone or not, this makes it quite easy to find out which users have the best signal to noise ratio.

So, if the number of followers a user has is greater than the number of people that certain user is following, the TechCrunch guys say that it could be worth clicking through that person’s profile.

But if a person follows significantly more people than the number of users it is followed by, then you should probably think twice before following back.

Do you use the Golden Ratio method to decide which users are worthy of following on Twitter or you have some other mechanism of selecting who you follow back? Sound off in the comments.

For those of you who use both Twitter and social networking site Facebook, it will be pretty clear that recent changes to the Facebook platform seem to be following in Twitter’s footsteps, and now it would seem it has gone one step further, as now Facebook recommends befriending celebrities to your account, via fan pages.

This move of course mirrors that of Twitter’s recommendations available upon signing up, and via the ‘suggestions‘ page. Now, imitation apparently is the highest form of flattery, so Facebook’s moves may be seen as simply improving the user experience, although one thing is for sure, I would suggest they change the terminology used, as for example, do I really know U2?

Webware, over at CNET News, thinks that Twitter’s search function over at search.twitter.com, despite being highly usefull for more niche searches is great, but when searching for a particualry popular topic can be somewhat lacking in it’s usefullness.

The article makes some interesting suggestions on how Twitter could improve it’s search, along with suggestions on how to get better resulsts from the search tool yourself. You can read the article in full here.