Participating. Let's see if the rest of your followers are. - Louis Gray

I encourage anybody who has their FriendFeed follower stats memorized to read this, and wonder how your community is engaging. - Louis Gray

For me, there's at least 50 people following me who don't do anything on Friendfeed; presumably they signed up, checked it out, and left. In terms of "interesting stuff:" there's been a lot of talk about it, but I don't know what that means or what people are implying by it. Is it based on some objective measure of interestingness? Is it based on popularity? Interesting to whom? Is saying "I ate a mango" interesting? Did it become interesting when 3 dozen people liked or commented on it? Does it matter? - Mark Trapp

Participation is important, but I think it's more of an art rather than a science to getting your audience engaged. Some things you'll try that you think are really interesting nobody else will notice: other things that you share offhand will really take off. I guess I'm missing the project in this post (and your comment, Louis): are we supposed to be looking for ways to get more likes and comments on our stuff? Are you imploring your followers to be more engaged with their subscriptions? - Mark Trapp

I neeeeeeeeever participate - Mona Nomura

I'm still around, Mark. I do a lot of reading, Not as much commenting. - BISQ

Oh BISQ, there are people way less active than you :) Some people subscribed to me have 0 comments, 4 all time (or less), with no updates since June. - Mark Trapp

I don't comment on much and neither do most of my followers. It looks like lurkers stick together? - Dominik Hofmann

I am not a lurker but everyone but most of the people seems to be since my posts hardly get answered - Cecil Sandus

Present. Good article. - Hao Chen

Justin ... while you were Particpating .. I really lurked this - Charlie Anzman

was actually thinking about this the other day. i feel I participate quite a bit but I rarely see my posts, whether they are Tweets, blog posts or straight FF comments get remarks. Fortunately I find participating rewarding and I don't view people participating on my threads as a major element of the "score card" - Lou Paglia

I do think the participation level is in direct relation to the quality of the post; so... great post; here I am! - Jorge Escobar

eh? - Andrew Feinberg

Hoow does one define a lurker on FF ? (a) person never likes/comments on FF (b) person who never comments on your post (c) a person who never posts. Participation is important, but also remember a wise man holds his tongue !! :)- - Peter Dawson

Justin, I just tried to submit this to Digg, and it keeps throwing up URL error, for some reason it doesn't like your URL structure - Duncan Riley

I can tell you that our data on socialmedian shows that about 10% of our users are driving the site for the other 90%. When I was at AOL years back we counted on 1%. Which is still probably the right metric with scale for these sites. That's probably similar to what Digg is at. Of course, if a FF or a socialmedian can get to scale with 5% of the users, that would be a big big homerun - Jason Goldberg

Justin, I think you should make the RSS image on your site a link to your feed as well as the Subscribe text. Very interesting post, BTW :) - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

Mark Trapp: Personally, I was just trying to see the engagement level of my followers within a 24 hour period. As I mentioned in the post, everyone gets what they want out of FriendFeed and I am not trying to dictate that commenting and liking indicates your "activity." You can be a "passive aggressive" user by referring to FF everyday but not commenting or liking. However, I believe the point of a social network is be active by posting, commenting and being, well, social. - Justin Korn

But Justin, are you blogging for yourself? Or for participation and comment counts? - Mona Nomura

Also, I want to make it clear that I am not imploring anything. I simply just did a quick analysis of how people are engaging with my threads/post. It is always nice to get feedback, but it is understood that not everything will get feedback. - Justin Korn

Lou: I find participating rewarding as well and try to comment/like anything I feel interested me or at least engaged me. - Justin Korn

Mona, no he's bloggin only for you :)- .. but thats a good question !! Do what you love. It works for the Pope and Steve Jobs !! :)- - Peter Dawson

Peter... my name's mona =( - Mona Nomura

Why is every link, internal and external, rel=nofollow on your blog? - Jake (aka Jawee) from twhirl

Mona: I am blogging for myself. However, I participate in social networks to be "social" - Justin Korn

Justin, understandable: I'm trying to understand this. What can that information be used for? So 1/3 of your subscribers interact with you over a 24 hour period of time. Are you suggesting that more people ought to be more involved in participating? Or are you suggesting that you personally ought to do something to increase that level of participation? It's one thing to measure something: but what's the call to action? What value is it to know how engaged your followers are? I guess my question is for everyone: what do we gain by trying to figure out what our followers are doing in a social network? - Mark Trapp

Jake: No idea. I just started this thing...still tweaking the bugs. What should the links say? - Justin Korn

Duncan: I'll try to fix it...could it be due to feedburner? - Justin Korn

Dah ? what are your sayin Mona ?? - did I do something wrong..hehehhe :)- - Peter Dawson

@Justin Korn: I have a Firefox extension that hilights nofollows. After looking into it, it appears you have "<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />" in your <head>. This means that all links are invisible to search engines... even your internal links. I recommend removing this. The only thing you may want to nofollow is blog author URLs, but Wordpress should take care of that anyway. Note: Twhirl messes up this post badly! View it in FriendFeed! - Jake (aka Jawee) from twhirl

Why sit around in a room as noisy as FF if you're not going to participate? Heck, most days, the conversations here are far more interesting than anything I could have blogged about off in vacuum by myself, anyway. - Derrick Burns

lurk lurk lurk... pay no attention, I am not really here. - Louie

And I just joined yesterday, and am still trying to get the lay of the land. So there, now I've commented and I'm not a lurker. But it will take some time for people like me to acculturate enough to participate, and we have lots of competition for attention. At least I'm reading FF several times a day. - Dimitrios Diamantaras

Participating! - Andrew Fielding from twhirl

Mark: Yes, I think people should in some way or another indicate they are participating, that's what a social network is for. Yes, I think I need to produce more engaging "stuff" to get my followers more engaged. I haven't exactly come to a conclusion on what the numbers mean yet. That is for the reader to determine at this point. After a few more of these analysis, I am hoping to have a better idea. It is hard to get a clear vision of what is going on over a single 24 hour period. - Justin Korn

Dimitrios: Welcome and take your time. Once you get a hang of it, you'll love it! - Justin Korn

Jake: I'll take a look. Perhaps I have one of the settings set incorrectly. - Justin Korn

Breakfast is for WINNERS! - Thomas Hawk

Jake: I think I found it. Should be good now. Duncan: can you let me know if the fix I just made helped with the Digg issue as well? - Justin Korn

Thomas: Totally agree :) Speaking of which, I gotta eat dinner! - Justin Korn

I have been absent from FF lately due to vacation, but I missed it does that count? - Blackopsmanners

Only 20 of 68 of my followers are active. The rest are somehow just lurking. And the main point there is that those 20 are the most active at FF as a whole. Hao, Mona, Louis, Bret, Mark, Duncan, Allen, Steve C, Steve R, Chris, MG... - AJ Batac

@Justin Korn: Looks good! - Jake (aka Jawee) from twhirl

-schweet lurk thread - videopixil from twhirl

Participating.Good stuff - Igor Poltavskiy

"everyone gets what they want out of it." good point. old media tells us how to interact, social media doesn't. and in the free market place of ideas, or even a good dinner party, some are better conversationalists than others. non-virtually, a conversation is dead if based on charity. is it interesting if folks comment to be nice? lurkers might be eyeballs, which = value, even if you aren't in it for money. comments mean you've pushed buttons, no comments mean many things which you can only guess. - Katie Ratcliffe

clearly I am boring too my followers most do not comment. - R. Ferguson

LOL - bit of both. ♥ to participate WAY more... simply not enuf hours in the day. Focused on Facebook & Twitter (um, when it's working!!) Still, @GuyKawasaki did include me on his Top 100 peeps to follow on FriendFeed, along with @Scobleizer so I must be doing *something* right. haha. http://frienderati.alltop.com - Mari Smith

I tend to lurk for the most part and toss 2 cents when I feel I have something to add. I don't follow as closely as I used to, so others beat me to the punch and say pretty close to what I would have said more often than not these days (make sense?) - Jason Lister

participating... as usual! ha! - Susan Beebe

Katie: Good points, thanks for sharing. IMO, I think every comment/like is fun to get. It shows people have read, appreciated what was said. With a blog, you have analytics running in the background telling you people are visiting and gives you the feedback you need to see if you are reaching out to people. On FF and other social networks, the only way to know you are reaching people is if they comment or like (in FriendFeed's case). - Justin Korn

Marcantonio - if you left a comment in Italian, I would find a way to translate it (as long as you noted it was Italian). - Justin Korn

I really enjoy participating in Friendfeed. I read tons a day but rarely get the chance to talk about it/offer my own spin. I simply don't have the time for a blog (and if I did, I'd be doing it on peer reviewed cognitive/social/neuropsychological research) so throwing in a quick $.02 is really satisfying. Besides, most of you here are really interesting and add relevant information to the content that's being shared (as opposed to Digg). - Derick Valadao