Twitter and inadequacy (er, the great friend divide)

I just checked the ebay auction and it’s over $1500 with 8 days remaining. I really don’t see the value. It’s important, in the business world at least, to have a great following. However, quality is so much more important than quantity. Great can be 50 people who support you matter what. Great is not 2000 people who follow you for no reason and have no loyalty to you. The other way to be great is to be a great person with great ideas inspired by great people.

Excellent points, Robert.

If not for Twitter I would not be involved in converations with some of the greatest developers, people and tech geeks the world has to offer.

I would not have it any other way.

Robert I like it. I just followed Scott’s directions and Twitter is working much better for me now. I have to agree with nacho I often have a hard time getting real life friends interested in technology.

I have been adding people from different countries that I either speak the language of with a degree of fluency or I am studying. As a linguist this allows me to pick up on changes and nuances in these languages by people who are native or regular users of these languages.

Plus looking at Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic scripts on here is cool. Mix in some French, Spanish and Catalan and I start to get quite a worldview or cacophany if you like, Babel even.

I have also added news services from different regions and am finding that I am getting news reports as they happen before the major wires are giving the full story.

I heard about Twitter when it first started but it didn’t seem applicable to me at that time. I later joined it and tried to get a few friends and family on it. It was nice to have a new way to communicate with them but they all haven’t seemed as enthusiastic about it as I have and fair enough.

However reading an article on Silicon Wadi led me to a whole series of clicks that has me using Twitter in a completely different way and in fact probably quite close to what Robert has described. I have about 50 people following me but I am following in theory about 500 twitter accounts although I would say that maybe a third of those are active.

Yes some people say you can’t do it and if you have more than 500 people you are just clicking to add people and therefore don’t want to be ‘friends’ with you. As long as they allow me to follow them I am still getting the insights as described above.

In a couple of instances this has been a little frustrating I would not have minded a conversation but that is as it may be. In one instance someone asked for their new followers to identify themselves and the only way to do that was to click on the link they provided to Facebook. That I didn’t actually feel inclined to want to add them as a Facebook ‘Friend’ although I did say hello provides some indication as to order of priority.

One ‘twit’? asked me how I had located their profile but didn’t add me as a friend. I replied simply by stating I had entered cities and countries in the provided search boxes and added those who I thought had something to say. I am sure I will have more to say on this in the future. Probably 2 minutes after I submit this but… ;]

Great post Robert! Couldn’t agree more. There is obviously benefit to having followers and following others though. Sure, you can gain a lot of insight from following lots of quality people. Likewise, having thousands of people listening to you doesn’t hurt either.I think the end game with Twitter is to have lots of both.

You have described the reasons why I primarily use my site to read feeds rather than worry about who might ever read my occasional blog entries. The programmer in me wants to do this myself so I’m having great fun adding tons of feeds using Drupal and some modules. Having lots of feeds aggregated doesn’t mean I have to read everything coming in all of the time, that would be a bit crazy. I just read the things I want when I want. I delete feeds that bore me. I add feeds that sound interesting. A friend can just look at my site to see what I’m interested in. Very fun. I gather Twitter is much the same except that short burst change the nature of the communication.

Scoble, great post. I don’t have that many followers, but I follow a lot of people and my experience with Twitter has been great. Cheers!

Social networking can be a wonderful tool that allows me to be myself at a greater distance. I’m working on a news story I’m calling Street Kids Across America simply because I connected with a memoirist expert on the matter from the U.S. East Coast via MySpace. I’m localizing with my own hyperlocal content on the U.S. West Coast. That’s the power of social networking.

I’m barely beginning Twitter but already have an interview lined up with Noah Glass. Why? Because Twitter has been developed to help people connect minds, ideas and more. And I’ve only been twittering a week… great post.

I ponder the future of Twitter. The question I ponder is: is it scalable? I don’t mean can it support n million users, but whether user x can really get great value from following too many users. Now that I am following like 1,000 people, I find it hard to follows the ones that say interesting things. And of course I can prune that list, but what will I miss. Its like trying to listen in on two many conversations at a party.

Will Twitter have to go with a ‘groups’ approach? Where you can group users… and then how does the top level UI change?

Or maybe my brain is too small to process x conversations at once. That’s probably true independent of the comments I made above.

Sometimes I feel sort of pathetic since I don’t follow any “real-life” friends on Twitter. I’ve tried to talk them into trying it out, but none have any interest. I follow people like Scoble, Leo, Kevin, Dvorak (finally) and other Tech folk I’ve been fans of over the years. I enjoy receiving their tweets and hearing what’s going on, so I guess that’s what it’s all about. For me at least.

The Google Talk Gadget is pretty nifty actually. I was working all night and about to wind down and I saw out of the corner of my eye a couple of tweets from my daughter who didn’t seem like a happy camper after getting a nasty critique on her design work. I guess her boyfriend wasn’t around ;].

I fired off one @message and then 5-6 directs at her. She gets them to her cellphone, we are a few timezones and a continent apart. So very cool twitter function amongst all the other networking. It’s also personal.

Great message, Robert. Did someone say brilliant? Well, maybe not revolutionary, but I definitely thank you for bringing some common sense to the party

I have been tracking some social media trends on my blog as well, and have a track-back setup for you as well over at http://www.changeforge.com/2008/04/17/scoble-on-the-friend-divide-in-social-media/

Keep up the great thoughts. It’s tough following the volume of your posts, but these little gems are worth it.

Yeah, you keep saying this, and I get it, and it’s true, Facebook was dead for me even with old college friends or relatives, until I followed you and mined your friends to make my newsfeed more interesting BUT…

You can’t build worlds only on having the 2 or 10 percent of content producers acquire followers.

And that’s all you’re doing, is mining the millions of Twitterers for the ppl who make content. The examples you supplied are all professional content produers. While it’s true you have lots of guys named Joe fooling around in their garage in Dubuque, Iowa, took, you couldn’t expect to mine their occasional insight to keep yourself from being bored forever.

Everyone who has ever been on a MMORPG or Virtual World knows that the 10 make for the other 90. Will Wright always talked about this. It’s a kind of law. Perhaps social media bumps this up *a tiny bit* to make *a few more people* content providers. It enables amateurs to get a look-see. But, ultimately, there are vast quantities of consumers, looking for content, and you can’t pretend you are dining out on gazing at the infinite reflection of them following you as really satisfying just because it makes you feel altruistic.

“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.”

- Isn’t that why it’s called social networking?

Hey Robert,

great post. It’s all about engaging people. What u put in is what u will get out of it. I started following you on @CoachDeb recommendation.

Enjoyed reading your Israel tweets.

Your quote sums it all up:

“If you define yourself by who is following you you’ll always feel inadequate. But, define yourself by who you are following and you can really build something of high value.”

Ann Rusnak
“The Time Diva”

I agree with the last part most. I love to read blogs by people from other fields than mine, I think I learn more from them than from reading what people who do exactly the same thing as me have to say. Similarly, I enjoy immensely ‘listening’ to twitterers with different interests. But many still think this is a waste of time, with no immediate return. Is our life one of immediate returns only?

Thanks for this post. Nadine Touzet

I think you’re right on track with this. A lot of people want to collect followers for some sort of ego value, but I think it’s more for the exchange of information. I cull good little tidbits from Twitter and I have great conversations on Pownce. I learn about good sites on StumbleUpon, and so on…I treat my friending differently in each space.

On Twitter I’ll follow back most people, except for the obvious “friend collectors.” As my Pownce list has grown, I’ve become a bit fussier. I aim for slow growth there because I don’t want to have so many friends that I can’t keep up with, and reply to the threads. I guess you have to fine-tune the strategy to each community.

But really the difference between social media and regular Web sites is the direction of communication. We’re not just pushing content out on these sites, if we do just that we’ll be ignored. Instead we’re sharing our ideas, consuming the ideas of others and sometimes having a conversation in the process. That can’t be done with a tiny friends list. It needn’t be as large as yours, but I do think you need to reach a certain saturation point in order for the dialog to happen.

And while some are skeptical of your ability to manage such large lists, you’re also quite good at replying to Tweets, so somehow you are managing which shows that it must be working for you.

p.s. I saw a few people mentioning FriendFeed which is a cool tool, but I’ve recently started using http://www.socialthing.com and found it’s another great way to keep track of multiple accounts in one location. Quite handy even if managing smaller groups than yours.

Man, what a great post! I’m new to twitter and really think it has great potential. And I agree that a lot can be learned from who “you” follow, not who is following “you”.

I’ve just did some catchup (use to follow, then left, now I’m back) on your blog reading. Keep you the great work.