Anil Dash has been presenting some really interesting information about the results of being on Twitter’s infamous suggested user list. He’s found that while it does drive up your follower count very rapidly, those followers don’t seem to be active in any way, in terms of responding, retweeting, or otherwise interacting with you. And other accounts on the list are confirming his experience. Today he follows up with the logical conclusion, which is that large follower counts are meaningless.
Why is this important? There are around 16,000 people on Twitter claiming to be social media experts, and I doubt that many of them are telling their clients that being on the suggested user list is not an easy route to Twitter success, and that raw follower counts don’t really matter, unless you just want to flex your e-peen.
All that said, you should of course be following rc3dotorg on Twitter.
The social graph is not the future
Before he created the awesome bookmark site Pinboard, Maciej Ceglowski was known primarily as a writer of incredibly good essays. For example, he recently wrote about the Arabic language, and in 2005, famously wrote the definitive essay criticizing the space shuttle program.
Yesterday, he wrote a post on the Pinboard Blog criticizing the concept of the social graph. This paragraph really nails the inadequacies of computerized models of our human relationships:
I love this bit on the awkwardness of actually constructing our personal social graph as well:
There’s a reason everybody is talking about this essay. It’s profound and important.
On a closely related note, check out the blog post from last week everyone was talking about — Zach Holman’s Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work.