Twitter blown back to the stoneage?
One of the things I truly love about the web is the potential for transparency and authenticity and using those means as ways of enabling meaningful conversation that can ultimately take us to new and interesting places of thought and innovation.
Microblogging services such as Twitter are potentially an important part of this. And this is why it came as somewhat of a surprise when Michael Accrington of TechCrunch decided to try to blow all this back to the stoneage with his implicit suggestion of using a new concept of Fake Follow on Twitter to effectively kill transparency and authenticity in the conversation.
Basically Accringtons problem is this: He’s too popular. He has too many people, who follow him on Twitter (apparently you can have such a thing as too many fans) and his lust for following them in return is almost inverse. He couldn’t be bothered. That’s why he’s suggesting a Fake Follow which makes it seem to his loyal fan that he’s returning the gesture when in fact he’s absolutely not.
I absolutely hate the idea of a Fake Follow. It reminds me of old industrial thinking where companies only care about their customers, when they are paying to buy products and then otherwise don’t really give a damn. It’s self serving. It’s pretentious.
It’s all the things that the evolving social web should be looking towards getting rid of. It’s one of those things that have the people, who want to classify the social web as a fad, sit back and laugh like they’ve never laughed before.
It’s potentially such a giant step back in time. And the fact that it comes from an A-lister just makes it so much more sad.
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5 comments
That microblogging potentially enables innovation and such is absolutely true. I totally agree. But it’s the flow of information, the content of the tweets, that is the source. Not the relationship between the users.
The problem is - to Michael Arrington - that a lot of people aren’t able to distinguish between friendship/contacts and flow of information. Would you want him to publicize his list of feeds in his feed reader as well? That’s what following on Twitter is. Reading someone else’s publicized content. On Twitter you even have the ability to write the person a direct message complaining about his lack of interest in your musings - making the need for a Fake Follow even bigger.
Openness, authenticity and transparency in our age is about sharing content and telling out loud how you got the knowledge or the idea. Fake Follow is about courtesy towards strangers. I really don’t think that he is thinking branding of TechCrunch but rather is minimizing the time spent on hopeless 16 year old that want him as a friend. That is, it’s about being able to acknowledge someone following you, but not ruining your stream of tweets.
Is it self-serving? Maybe. Most suggestions basically are. Though, I don’t see the great disadvantages to other people, so self-serving is probably a bit too harsh (even when we’re talking about Michael Arrington).
Pretentious? I don’t think so. Instead it’s probably just a feature that would keep more popular tweeters aboard. You can do something similar on Facebook. A service that is all about actual friendships. I like it there as well. Some of my Facebook friends are actually my friends, but their Facebook behaviour might not be interesting to me and hence I don’t prioritize their streams.
I’d like a Fake Follow if theese friends chose to move to Twitter. I’d like to tell them that I love them, but I’m not sure that telling them that I’m not interested in their ongoings on Twitter would benefit anyone. And actually, when they get a hang of it, I just might want to follow them and would love to have a “friends you don’t follow list” to pick from. That list could also remember me to pop by their Twitter sites once and in a while making their precence felt and enable me to find some interesting stuff in their contacts lists.
All that said, I don’t need the feature and don’t care. But I sincerely believe that you’re wrong. Especially on the back to the stone ages. You’re from there, I’m afraid. Filtering contacts on these kind of online services is brand new and not that well implemented many places. But highly necessary.
Jaiku has made it possible for me to remove some of my contacts’ feeds from my stream. Is that a bad thing? If you think so, your friends don’t share enough.
Thanks for your comment, René. I really appreciate it and the thougth going into it.
I think we agree on the major principle: That some sort of filtering on these services is highly necessary. We might just disagree on the way to do it.
I honestly don’t think having a Fake Follow helps anyone. To me it feels like cheating and trying to game a system instead of fixing it.
I understand that popular users may spend a lot of time on nobodys who want to friend them and receiving the odd annoying message from them. But wouldn’t the latter be better solved by a combination of simply making the abiltity to send direct messages dependant on a confirmed reciprocal relationship and a shared understanding that even though you might want to friend me, I might not necessarily want to friend you back?
The thing is, it’s not gaming a system, but gaming someone you don’t really know. And the con is absolutely harmless. Utterly!
Furthermore, we’re not necessarily talking about nobodys but simply people that make tweets one is not interested enough in - and therefore would not want it in the main stream.
Disabling direct messages does not make the unconnected tweeter happy. Connecting does. Filtering his messages is none of his business whatsoever
But here we come back to your point about messing with the system. It does make the “Following” sidebar rather useless, but if that one is compiled and ordered after some sane filtering rules, it could work out to be a lot better than it is now. Most replied users first could be one option.
One thing is sure. The wording “Fake Follow” is unnecessarily stupid and rather rude. Promoting people to one’s main stream (or removing people from that one to a secondary one) would be the the positive rephrasing
Sorry, forgot to answer your question. You asked, “But wouldn’t the latter be better solved by a combination of simply making the abiltity to send direct messages dependant on a confirmed reciprocal relationship and a shared understanding that even though you might want to friend me, I might not necessarily want to friend you back?”
Basically, that’s not doable. You can tweak the system, not the mindsets of a few million people. That shared understanding will not happen. That’s the whole problem. Twitter has actually done what they could by calling it “following” instead of “friends”. The latter is NOT suitable for much more than Facebook and other less known friendship tools.
Agree with you completely on the last part. Let’s give it another name. Maybe what we’re discussing here is merely the rethoric of it all. In the end I don’t think we disagree much even though I admit I took an offended angle to the matter.
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