Hi. I agree. I have a blog post in me about the concept of friend online these days. Tim has been calling the behavior of Twitter (versus, say, Plurk) part of its UI. I prefer to
think of it as the dynamics - you could have the same dynamics with a totally different UI. But maybe that’s just
mincing words. In any case the asymmetric follower relations
clearly work nicely and do give a very different feel to
Twitter as opposed to Facebook or Plurk (for which it
is perhaps too early to tell).

I hope to make another posting soon… but I also have “work” things to be doing.

Thanks for stopping by!

Terry

Twitter has the potential to really get at the problem of abundance of information and scarcity of meaning. The idea of having PageRank-like algorithm to help figure out who to follow could accomplish several things at once:

1. More focused social interaction (but with flexible options)
2. The benefits of the selective pressures of human search
3. Ability to have a meaningful, reliable and usable Directory for users

The list could go on. But as we enter a more mobile web, we’re going to need a sleek and powerful way to converge our needs.

A Googlesque Twitter has got to be a worthwhile look-see.

I feel no compulsion to follow someone who’s following me, and sometimes have reason to follow someone who won’t follow me. Trying to couple that with the concept of ‘friendship’ does damage to a very important aspect of humanity. (c.f. Aristotle)

google’s probably not that concerned about the fate of jaiku, or what Twitter does — since it can still feed off the data twitterstreams produce. Feed Google Feed.

I agree with the sentiment, but not with your content :-) Unless you make yourself completely private you don’t have control over who follows you. I was suggesting guides who *volunteer* to be assigned as followers of newbies. The people who volunteer obviously want it. The newbie who would otherwise be twittering to an audience of ZERO can perhaps ask a question, get a reaction, etc. If the guide followers find the new person boring (etc) they’re free to unfollow.

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough. In any case, thanks for commenting!

I fully agree about *not* going for as many followers as possible and don’t like services that are like that as the idea of a “friend” (or whatever) becomes completely meaningless. For that reason I do like Twitter and I do like LinkedIn, but don’t like Facebook, and have a feeling that Plurk is heading in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s just an age thing.

Dr. Wright
http://www.twitter.com/drwright1

As Jonathan Wight twittered, “Google is where social apps go to die.” Either from benign neglect or a deep misunderstanding. Google seems to get mobile applications and mapping in a big way, but not Social stuff.

http://twitter.com/schwa/statuses/828591994