The Twitter gods are at war.
Foreward: Loic Le Meur started it with the tweet heard round the world. Robert Scoble led the outrage initiative, and Michael Arrington fanned the flames.
And me? I'm just a wanna-be blogger who has been planning to write an article on "social capital" for a while now. Now seems like a good time.
Follow me on Twitter (shameless plug).
The Good Stuff
First off, go check out these guys' Twitter profiles and pay close attention to the number of followers they have. In fact, if you're reading this, there is a good chance that you are one of them. When these Twitans talk about social capital, it's like billionaires talking about money: you listen (and it makes you nauseous).
The plot thickens when Le Meur is trying to think of a way to filter the firehouse that is Twitter. His idea is to add "authority" based search and filtering, where authority = the number of followers/twits a tweeter has.
Scobleizer, being the white-knight geek that he is, vehemently opposed the idea although he has over 46,000 followers. Why? Because then guys like me would never be found in such a search.
I personally do think that the whole issue was overblown. As an optional feature, "sort by followers" might be useful for us lemmings. Sometimes you just want to follow who everyone else is following, especially in the tech world. Why? Because we at least want to know what everyone else knows.
But this is also the problem. How do you discover anything new? If you follow any of the big tech blogs, you're familiar with the problem. It's like watching news on all the networks. They all have the same stories, even if it's about a heroic dog. (Cool, yes, but worthy of being a major piece on every channel?)
So the big question still is, how do we sort all of this crap out? Le Meur said
but when someone who has thousands, if not tens of thousands of followers starts to speak, you have to pay attention
No, Le Meur, I really don't. It depends on what they are talking about. Tom Cruise may be more well known, but a good shrink might be better advised if when I get the blues.
Tom (not Cruise) may be everyone's friend on MySpace, but I'm going to listen more closely to what one of my real friends has to say.
Kevin... Ok, I could go on all day with analogies, but I won't (because you would just stop reading).
At the core of the problem is this: Range of Influence vs Degree of Influence. The Toms have a far greater range of influence than your average Joe, but degree? I suspect not. (Unless they are talking about their respective fields.) That's why when Hollywood starts getting preachy, we all run for the toilets. Nobody Few respect them as a moral authority.
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch now suggests that
It's Not How Many Followers You Have That Counts, It's How Many Times You Get Retweeted
That's a nice thought. After all, if you retweet something, it means you found it useful/interesting, right? That could be a measure of degree of influence, but then there are losers like me who never retweet anything. If I like it, I just bookmark it. (But I'm a Twitter newbie.)
Counting retweets still doesn't solve the problem. Not just because it relies on user action, but also because those with a large range of influence have a large fan base, and fans are fanatical. BarackObama could tweet that he brushed his teeth and that information would be echoed all throughout the Twitosphere.
So I agree with Scoble that number of followers does not equal authority on a wide range of topics. But it may mean authority within a narrow field. How do we narrow the field guys? Social tagging for experts? (eg. Tag, you're an expert on acting but not psychiatry.) Now that might be interesting.
But it'll still exclude me.
