Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Fri, 23 Oct 2009

Leaders and Followers

Twitter and Identica are two "Social Media" channels on the Web. Their value to me is mixed. The "fault" causing mixed value isn't the services themselves, I believe. The fault comes from the list of individuals I choose to follow. Each of them has a perspective that either interests me, or could interest me.

It has been a few months that I have had accounts on Twitter and Identica. I don't follow too many people, but I get at least 100 entries to read from each service each day. To keep abreast of the services, I use a Firefox add-on, Echofon in a couple of versions, TwitterFox and IdentiFox. They sit in my status bar and show me how many messages have come in since I last looked. They allow me to pop up the unread list and deal with the messages as I wish. It works out well. Nonetheless, I don't do much with many of the messages.

Many of the messages are the semi-random thoughts or observations of the individual. Sometimes the observation is mildly interesting. Other times it is completely forgettable, and I just skim through to be sure I didn't miss something significant. Some of the messages have links in them. The message calls my attention to information that my "source" has found interesting. I follow some of the links and get to information that I appreciate and would not have encountered without the link.

In some ways, the service provides value because of the ratio of "leaders" to "tweeters". In this case, I am suggesting that a tweeter is mainly leaving a clutter of comments that are easy to ignore while a leader is someone who gives me information I want to further pursue. My satisfaction with Twitter and Identica depends on having a high leader/tweeter ratio. I think it also requires that I keep myself under control by limiting the absolute number of people and or tags I try to follow. I believe that at some point, even high value messages would overwhelm me as I add too many sources to the list of those I follow. It's a little like high volume mailing lists where a large number of people send messages. At some point, too much of a good thing is indistinguishable from spam.

How do you select your sources on the social networks?