NaNoWriMo buddy list: What’s it for? Tips and more.

Heh. That title rhymes.

NaNoWriMo buddies are a long standing tradition of National Novel Writing Month. Sometimes they take the feature down while relaunching the site but we always get them back before the competition really starts. To add any other NaNoWriMo user as a buddy, just go to their profile and click the Add as Buddy link near their profile picture. Need a live example? Here’s my profile.

You’ll also start getting emails when other users add you as a buddy.

What does this mean? What’s the point of buddies?

Many people blast everyone they know asking them to add them as a buddy but I think that defeats the purpose. This isn’t Twitter or Facebook where having as many followers as possible is a point of pride and I think just blindly collecting buddies actually decreases the usefulness of this feature.

Instead of blindly courting followers to get your follower numbers up…

• use your buddy list to keep track of friends you’ve made in the NaNoWriMo community
• use your buddy list to follow users that inspire or otherwise push you to increase your word count

As the ML for my region, everyone in my area tends to buddy me. I love this and I talk to absolutely everyone in my area so it makes sense but I don’t friend everyone back. The main reason for this is that I depend on my buddy list to push me and keep me on pace during NaNoWriMo. I think of those people as my pace cars and, if I friend too many people, those users that inspire me get pushed below the fold where I can’t find them at a glance. (I really wish they’d give us a Top Friends type widget so I could friend everyone without losing sight of my pace cars.)

Of course, because they call this list “buddies” and not “pace cars” some people get offended every year when others don’t buddy them back. Luckily, anyone who’s buddied you shows on your list just underneath your buddies… so they can still watching your profile and word counts even if they didn’t buddy you back. It may be hard to understand if you think of it as a social networking system like Facebook but it’s truly nothing personal if someone doesn’t friend you back. We all use the buddy list a little differently.

It’s also beneficial to track your NaNo friends so that you’ll remember them from year to year and also be able to connect with them during the off season.

So, how do you use your buddy list? And how many buddies do you have right now?