Of followers and following
Thanks for visiting this blog for the first time. Check out the home page for the most recent posts, or the archives if you're looking for something in particular. Here are some of our favorite posts, which you might enjoy:
- The Moleskine GTD tabs hack
- No choice but to get things done (on retro computing)
- How to subscribe to toilet paper
If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the RSS feed.
There seems to be a debate over which is more valuable. Jason Calacanis is giving away a MacBook Air to a follower once he has the most followers on all of Twitter. He often couched this as a competition with Robert Scoble, although Scoble encouraged his followers to follow Calacanis since Scoble argues that the power of Twitter lies in the number of people you follow and not the reverse. To me it’s not an either/or proposition.
The value in having lots of followers is in the crowdsourcing effect. As Calacanis has figured out, you have yourself an instant focus group on which you can bounce ideas. You can also make lazytweet requests or ask for advice. And of course, you can promote your latest content. For these uses to work, you need more than a few followers, so getting a fair share is useful.
On the flip side, the Twitter you see depends completely on who you follow. Lots of folks will sign up for Twitter, follow just the one or two friends who convinced them to join, and give up the pursuit as boring and pointless. To get the most out of Twitter you need to follow a good number of people. You don’t have to know them, you just have to find them interesting. I follow a bunch of journalists, bloggers, authors, technologists, and musicians that I don’t know personally, but their tweets make Twitter useful. Plus when I respond to them, they often write back, which is pretty neat.
Now, I don’t care for the fire hose approach that Scoble takes. He follows everyone that follows him and then some, and that’s over 21,000 now. Too much noise to signal for me. Anytime someone follows me I check out their feed and see if it’s interesting to me. Often it’s not—just very personal anecdotes from someone I don’t know. That’s a fine use for Twitter, just not for me, so I won’t follow. But if there are interesting bits I’ll follow them for a while and see how it goes.
Every so often I’ll prune who I follow. Usually I’ll notice someone’s just not as interesting to me as I thought or maybe they’ve become too self-promotional (moderation is key in this area). But I’m constantly trying out new people that I discover. Everyone’s view of Twitter is different, and the idea for me is to get just the right balance of interesting people and people I know and care about.
Interesting bit: I’ve found that I consistently have about 30 percent more followers than folks I follow. Pretty neat, but I’m not going to follow more folks for the sake of getting more followers. I’m happy with my zen balance and I hope you’ll find yours, too. So, if you haven’t already, go out and hit some follow buttons!
Scoble on the friend divide
For folks who just signed up for Twitter and tell me they stil don’t get it, Scoble has a good answer:The friend divide means that people who have no friends on these services have poor experiences and aren’t getting any interesting information or apps or photos or music, etc. People who have tons of friends have HUGELY different experiences on these services. I’ll demonstrate those differences in a video soon.
So true. Once you’re on, the first thing you need to do is start following some interesting people. You don’t have to know them to enjoy their musings. I recommend @hotdogsladies and @jdickerson.
Twitter + meatspace
Twitter is incredibly amazing and I will not relent in talking about it ad nauseam. Yesterday I was one of those caught in the American Airlines kerfuffle and treated to their classy service. I found myself bored at LAX’s Gate 44, which seems to be in an undisclosed location, because I can’t describe to you how to get there; I think I was blindfolded part of the way there. So to amuse myself I nudged everyone I knew on Twitter. I got back some neat replies from lots of folks who don’t Twitter often. The coolest one, though, I got a few minutes after I had landed.It turns out my friend John, who lives in San Francisco and who I haven’t seen in a while, was in the air when I nudged and had just landed as well. “Just landed at IAD. Maybe I’ll run into @jerrybrito in the Star Wars-esque people mover,” he said. Holy crap! He didn’t even know where I was traveling, yet there he was. Sure enough, we met up a few minutes later at baggage claim. He had come in on another flight. Totally serendipitous and totally wonderful.
In other news, Flickr now does video.
A testament to the insincerity of politics: John Edward’s Twitter status hasn’t been updated in 4 months. Not even a “dropping out of race” tweet.
Scoble argues that the “secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following.” I’m not sure there’s any secret to Twitter and I’m not sure it’s an either or proposition. Having lots of followers is valuable because you can crowdsource. Chek out Merlin asking for video help. Calacanis calls it “the world’s greatest focus group.” I get what Scoble means, but I’m afraid of the signal to noise ration would be weak. By his rationale he should give away an Air to get to top of this list.
More Twitter talk
I’m seeing more and more people joining Twitter and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it. My initial reaction to Twitter was skepticism, but I became a convert after I subscribed to Clay Shirky’s feed and received a tweet from him a couple hours later about his talk in D.C. that I would have never known about. That was useful, and since then I’ve found Twitter more and more useful.First of, I’d like to explain what it is for the sake of those who don’t know. I’ll do so by way of video:
The first thing to note is that Twitter is a classic example of network effects because its usefulness increases relative to the number of users on it. Its usefulness also increases exponentially when people you know and care about make there way onto it. The network seems to be growing in concentric circles and while it’s been dominated by the elite digerati in Silicon Valley so far, it seems to be making its way to DC now.
The video presents Twitter as a way to let people know what you’re doing at the moment. In fact, Twitter itself suggests that you use the service to answer the question, “What are you doing?” But if we took that literally, like some do, Twitter would truly be dull: “Going to the bank,” “Eating ice cream,” “Going to sleep.” Alex King suggests that the “what are you doing” question be replaced with the imperative, “Say something interesting.” In practice that’s what most people have done.
My friend Julian Sanchez uses Twitter mostly to announce at which bar he is currently so that anyone nearby who gets his tweet on a mobile phone can drop in an join him for a drink. I’m sure people join him who otherwise wouldn’t have. Blogger Robert Scoble uses it to crowdsource. Recently he was scheduled to interview the CFO of Amazon on stage before a conference. He’s got about 13,000 people in his network and he asked them what he should ask the CFO. He got back many insightful questions he would never have thought up himself. (As an aside, I’m curious if you know of other innovative uses. Post in the comments.)
Ultimately the best thing about Twitter is that it’s a different experience for each user. You only see the tweets of the people you follow. If someone’s not your cup of tea, you can silently boot them. The result is a stream of interesting stuff that only gets more useful as more people you know get on it. In the short while I’ve been on it I’ve been pointed to more interesting article, sites, and videos than I could have imagined. Give it a whirl… and follow me!
I’ve posted my notes from Clay Shirky’s talk today at the Tech Liberation Front. You can check them out here.
As you might have noticed, I’ve started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling. Well I think I might just have hit it. I subscribed to Clay Shirky’s tweets since just today the UPS delivered his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Lo and behold, a few hours later I get this tweet from Shirky: “Getting ready for a talk tomorrow at New America Foundation in DC.” I had no idea and I’ll probably go now. Awesome.
Something else I don’t get
I’ve explained before that I don’t get MySpace and am afraid I might be getting old. Something else I don’t get is Twitter. What am I missing? Liz Gannes at GigaOm today:Your phone buzzes, and you learn your pal Suzie is out at lunch. It buzzes again, and you find out your web calendar going through an outage. The wonders of invasive-by-choice technology!
As Steve Jobs would say, “Yech!”
-
Welcome.
This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
Categories
Search
Presently Reading
