If you are on Twitter, you may have noticed that, every Friday, people start to use the hastag #followfriday with wild abandon.

Follow Friday is the brain child of Micah Baldwin and friends who decided to start recommending people for their followers to follow every Friday. They added the hashtag (that is the #followfriday that organizes topic threads on Twitter) and started a Twitter wide phenomena. Just watch this page on any Friday to see what I mean.

But what has always struck me about follow Friday is that it’s basically a selfless trend. Sure, some people are demanding that people follow them every Friday but the majority of tweets under that hashtag are people trying to get followers for other people. The spirit of the original day was to recommend cool people to your followers and, for the most part, it has stayed true to that original idea.

In a modern world where everyone seems to put themselves first, I cannot help but feel like that is pretty cool. It’s a simple idea and a really beautiful one. It’s like saying, “I enjoy your tweets so I am going to tell my followers to follow you in turn.” There is no greater endorsement than a recommendation from a stranger who has nothing to gain by recommending you and no greater feeling than knowing that you are appreciated. ColderICE took this a step even farther last Friday by recommending some eBay related Twitter users on his blog and I know that follow Friday inspired me to create the Shop tab above highlighting the stores of my fellows and also why I try to retweet the good stuff I read and otherwise find on the web. It feels good to pay it forward!

Tweet others how you would like to be tweeted is the moral of the story, I suppose.

So this Friday take the spirit of that out off line. Recommend your friend’s book to a co-worker. Your brother’s landscaping company to a neighbor. If there is someone cool in your life, recommend them to someone else. Or just let that person know they are cool themselves. If everyone did that, even just once a week, the world would be a better place.

And they say the internet isn’t good for anything. . .