I do think there’s a devaluation of social networks when person A follows B just so that person B will follow A and thus increase person A’s follower count.

In fact, I feel strongly enough about it that I’ve blogged about it:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/02/an-attention-ponzi-scheme/
http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/07/the-real-twitter/ (cited in the post)

And then I went as far as to propose a measure that would reflect attention scarcity and thus expose the silliness of this game:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/

What’s very cool is that Jason Adams went ahead and implemented this measure:

http://tunkrank.com/

Will that change the way people use Twitter? Probably not. But hopefully it helps move the conversation in the right direction.

Thanks for your honesty. If you think you’re an ego maniac I can confirm that there are people who have far fewer followers than you and don’t even bother responding to @s or DMs (or worse, don’t follow anybody back). I personally don’t like the “follow” structure. It’s artificial and the undercurrent of need for reciprocation – and offense of not being followed back – creeps me out sometimes … (and the social valuation of certain follows over others just adds to that).

Is it ego or just a desire to have real and direct communication with those who are engaging you directly through a tool or just common sense? The reality is, for all of us, there are very few people in any of our networks that we feel inclined to engage on a regular basis. That said, there are a great many people who might post right_now_relevant stuff that relates to something you’re actively focused on (though you may otherwise not have much connection with that person). That has a lot of value and throws the dunbar question out the window (but that’s a pretty random way of engaging a system).

As always, I’d like to see more granularity. I remember you once cutting one of your networks down to 10 people. I’d love it if I could toggle between 10 arbitrary people and 10 people that i’ve selected and change this up whenever I feel like it (withouth anybody knowing specifically). I suspect we’ll be able to do this soon with some of the reader tools.

I also fantasized about some sort of radio dial to tune people in and out depending on what social “channels” we were in the mood for. There are days when I’m more in the mood for something political and critical and then days when I’m interested in something lighter and more playful. We can’t be all things to all people. Nor should we try.

There might be a core group I ‘follow’, and there are certainly people who follow me who engage me, but most people are in that ‘ambient social circle’ classification.

Naturally, this might be breaking of the social rules. Well, it is. In fact, it’s downright egomanical and self-centered. My Twitter pages or apps (or Facebook, etc) are set to the @ME interface– a replies tab or even a search query with my name.

At first, I talk more than I listen, however it switches into conversation (yes, I believe Twitter = chat and most of my days are personally spent idling and ironically, watching a few chatrooms scroll by– the reason it is different is because everyone in the room is generally on the same topic or two– not an absolute disjointed mess of conversations I have to parse).

If something says something profound enough, it gets echoed over and over and rises to the top. Otherwise, I watch my followers if I’m bored and sometimes something pops up I’ll respond to, usually resulting in a bigger conversation.

Obsessing about ‘me’ first and community second, helps keep the overload down. For me.