Seems like none of the big players have worked out what 'Personal Relevancy' is yet *sigh* - Chris Saad

Chris, I keep on "yelling". No one listens :( - directeur

But I have the cure for it and will publish it very soon! :) - directeur

I like this approach. I have about 20 social media thought leaders and users that I think are authorities on the topic. I listen, learn and converse with them. I use my own crap-o-meter to decide what matters and what doesn't. I find FF the best listening post for these yahoos too. =) Three of them are involved in this conversation. That suggests that this is a signal and not noise. - b2bspecialist

Jeremiah -- brilliant!! - Dave Winer

Expand to your friends then their friends. Number of followers is not an indication of quality and creates the wrong incentives. - Dave Winer

Absolutely - searching within your social graph is much more important than by follower numbers - there are plenty of search terms that'd simply return twitterfeed tweets and so forth... - Kristian Dye

I'm wondering whether number of comments is overrated too. To me a lot of comments can mean even more stuff to read. I'm looking for quality conversations in order to solve a problem, gain insight into something. A quality exchange if you will. - b2bspecialist

This is a good idea. Whilst many highly-followed twitterers are authoritative (O'Reilly, Scoble) many of them are egocentric air heads. The only problem is that you would only get results from within the subset of people you already follow. Many relevant hits would be missed. - hymanroth

Number of followers as measure of "authority"? Call it something else, but not "authority." Case in point: Scoble has 45k followers, Jonathan Zittrain, 1k. On some issues, one's more authoritative; on others, the other one is. - Tom Guarriello

A new feature or defined use for "Liking" could be that "I'm following/participating in an interesting conversation". Right now "Liking" is ambiguous. - b2bspecialist

I find Loic's suggestion really offensive -- that there is an ellite upper class of Twitter users. Feh. The really great ones haven't shown up yet. - Dave Winer

I already separate twitterers into groupings of authority. How? Friendfeed's lists.Friendfeed lets me search just my list too. Imagine it would present search result from your lists first. - Robert Scoble

I agree with Dave Winer. Number of followers is a useless metric. - Robert Scoble

Search based on trust within your own network is a great idea, and far more useful. Though in defense of Loic, he's looking at a different function / use case. When you want to limit your search to ideas that are spreading fast, your network isn't necessarily as relevant as the people with the most followers. http://www.loiclemeur.com/english... I'd rather see search by trusted sources, rather than popular sources. - Salim Virani

Salim: I want to be able to do this search: "show me items that contain 'obama' but only display items that have three or more likes and two or more comments." I guarantee you that such a search would be more useful than arranging by how many followers you have. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I don't support the original post. But when we talk about more replies or more likes, will the person who has 10000 followers get more replies or the one with 1000 followers get more? Please help me understand that point :) - Ramkarthik

Robert: Absolutely. I think faves and comments show both trust in an opinion, and likeliness of the conversation to spread. That's much better than # of followers. Your suggestion would better suit Loic's need to see what's trending fast at Le Web. Searching your own network on these factors would tell you what's trusted by your own sources, and which opinions are more relevant to you. Jeremiah's suggestion combined with yours would be immensely useful! Anyone want to build it with me? ;) - Salim Virani

Ramkarthik: look at friendfeed. Lots of things here get lots of likes. If you were right only my items would get lots of likes. - Robert Scoble

Jerremiah would you rather spend the large amount of hours Scoble spends doing it by hand? - Fred Grott

Robert: That is true. But when comparing the number of likes, yours would be at least 5x more than an average FF user's right? It would mean that anyway your result would come first when arranged according to number of likes. But surely number of likes is 10 times better than going by the number of followers. - Ramkarthik

Ramkarthik: huh? Look at "Best of day" today. That gives you a good idea of how things would rank. Sometimes my items are at top, but most of the time not. - Robert Scoble

I do love how 1 person wanting it managed a post on Techcrunch, and about 10 people talking against it will give off nothing there :) - Tyler (Chacha)

I just wrote a blog post about this. http://bit.ly/2EQPfT - Dave Winer

Chacha, I wouldn't be so sure about that. :-) - Dave Winer

Robert: True :) You win :) I saw the "best of day" and found none from yours (for today. I saw few yesterday). Seems your idea is the best and only do-able plan till now. - Ramkarthik

a bad solution to a problem that doesn't exist - Adam Ostrow

Authority doesn't mean popularity or notoriety. It's also not always about who you personally know, though that can help in some things. This is where tagging (e.g. - FriendFeed lists) would be helpful. Subject tags would be useful. I'd also be interested in a strength of connection measure. Could be as easy as 1 to 10, one being one-time drive-by conversation and 10 being your BFF. - AJ Kohn

Salim: tagging is a really cool idea. Peoplebrowsr.com has that already. - Robert Scoble

I've been asking for tagging in FF for awhile...would be very powerful for search, list mgmt. and data organization - Susan Beebe

Susan, I'm inviting you to a "private" room - please read the description :) - directeur

Tagging would be good. It may be interesting to see what someone would tag a conversation/content with. One may tag this "authentic search" and one may tag it "scoble conversations". What may happen over time is we may see how "the majority" end up tagging or classifying the conversation/content. Maybe a natural folksonomy will emerge. To me that is interesting to see how we socially establish some degree of organization to these random, and sometimes, really good conversations. - b2bspecialist