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Kevin Spidel › Likes
TwitterCounter Stats: We Track & Analyze @leolaporte - http://skitch.com/leotwit...
David, Nicholas James, Igor Poltavskiy and 43 other people liked this
Illustration of what the Twitter Suggestions list has meant to those picked, and those not.
- Leo Laporte
from Bookmarklet
Leo: a better one to watch is http://twittercounter.com/compare... @noah was one of the guys who came up with Twitter and @biz works at Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
its a conspiracy!
- Lasse Johnsen
It shows how subjective this reward is and how it made follower counts totally unreliable. But there's s omething deeper underneath these stats. Many of these accounts are not from real people. Twitter, er, @ev, is totally underplaying how many fake accounts are getting created lately.
- Robert Scoble
Leo: a discussion of "real" users vs. "fake" ones is here: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Robert Scoble
Doesn't an influx of fake accounts mean a buyout is imminent?
- Steven Cains
More doesn't always mean better!
- Fee501st
It isn't hard to follow (no pun intended) the cause and effect here. Many (most) users got obsessed with driving high follower numbers. We started talking about # of followers as "authority" (ack). Suddenly (shockingly?) we found that people started gaming the system (auto-follow/un-follow systems) in utterly transparent attempts to drive up their follower count. And here we are...
- Brian Roy
Leo: don't you think you may someday be one of those "suggested users?" Would that be a good thing or bad thing?
- Andy Sternberg
It's a dumb move by Twitter. It certainly disincents me to promote my Twitter account to the million+ listeners on my national radio show and podcasts. Why bother? Friendfeed makes more sense now. And @Andy, no, Twitter will never promote me back. I'm too often critical of them. (And I'd prefer they didn't - at least the people who do follow me are mostly real people!)
- Leo Laporte
"I'm too often critical of them" -- no doubt. That's why being recommended by them isn't actually an endorsement, it's the opposite -- it implies that you're in their pocket. That's why this thing poisons integrity on Twitter.
- Dave Winer
But friendfeed has "recommended users" too -- which appears to be weighted toward the already "popular." You're lucky Leo, you reach tons of people each day via online and terrestrial radio -- being mentioned as a suggested follow on air (by actual, talking, rational human) would mean a lot more to most than being "featured" without explanation on Twitter (not to mention being helplessly farmed by bots disguised as n00bs).
- Andy Sternberg
from fftogo
Every system that gains popularity is subject to gaming, and it is Twitter's job (like Google's, Digg's, etc) to stave it off.
- coldbrew
So now the new business model is, create startup, hire people to continually create ghost accounts to inflate subscriber numbers, ???, profit. >.>
- pitlord
from twhirl
Two good points @Andy - if, using legitimate methods that reach millions of people a week, I can't generate more than 500 new users a day, how are these people getting 5,000 new users a day? And as for the Friendfeed recommended users, this is an example of how to do it right - algorithmic recommendations based on who you're already following. I'm not sure how you make recommendations to totally new users, though - seems it would have to be a "Staff Picks" system as Twitter is using.
- Leo Laporte
Leo: This is probably punishment for starting that "Twit" radio thingy of yours, which *totally* tries to play off the popularity of the Twitter brand. ;-) [Edit: Lest anybody take me seriously, that's a joke. TWiT predates Twitter.]
- Ken Sheppardson
coldbrew - or charge for it. Anyone here angry that Google puts "sponsored links" at the top of your search results? Didn't think so. The problem is Twitter isn't be transparent AT ALL. How were these selected? Are they "paid" sponsor links? I don't think for a second that Twitter couldn't adopt the Google model and start charging for "placement" of users to boost follower count... of course that assumes there is somehow actual value in a high follow count (you can create $$$ from it).
- Brian Roy
I know you're joking kshep - but just in case anyone doesn't know, the TWiT trademark predates Twitter by almost two years, and ev told me on net@night that they were aware of TWiT but decided to go with the name, Twitter, anyway.
- Leo Laporte
Andy: but friendfeed's algorithm is objective, Twitters' is subjective. Friendfeed's has integrity (it is decided by an algorithm and is consistent in how it treats everyone). Twitter's does not (it is done by humans and is not consistent). Also, friendfeed does not only recommend 20 people. It goes forever (at least on my account it seems to, I can never reach the end). friendfeed also does not group one group together and let you add them with one click, so growth on all accounts is much more organic.
- Robert Scoble
coldbrew: that's the rub. This is a game BY TWITTER ITSELF!!! If you play footsie with @ev you get added. If you don't, you don't. Like Leo is getting punished for being anti Twitter while people who put far lamer content into the system get rewarded. Footsie alert! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Leo, I would say that Twitter seems to "get" transparency the same way the Obama administration does. >.>
- pitlord
from twhirl
Good points @Leo - personally I wish Twitter made better use of user favoriting. Some kind of algorithm to weigh recommendations would make it much more interesting. I've always liked how TEchmeme / Memeorandum does it. My snap reaction to A Fine Frenzy being on suggested list was -- figures, this is Jack Dorsey's kind of music.
- Andy Sternberg
Robert -- don't you mean Twitter is subjective, FF objective ?
- Brian Sullivan
Brian: yeah, I fixed that, sorry.
- Robert Scoble
Robert -- what do you mean yours goes on forever -- your recommended list? I have only one page with 31 entries.
- Brian Sullivan
Brian: I have 13,000 friends, remember? So my recommended page goes on a lot longer. I've tried to reach the end and can't.
- Robert Scoble
I didn't realize that FF's recommendations were based on who you already follow. It seemed to me that I would always get similar recs no matter when I looked. Kevin Rose was always at the top of my FF recos despite teh fact that he didn't even have a picture for a long time and rarely seems to use the service.
- Andy Sternberg
Obasanjo has a post up claiming Mr Tweet is the recommendation service of choice.
- coldbrew
Robert: so the length of the list is determined by the number of people you subscribe to -- as well as who they are connected to? So the list potentially grows exponentially with the number of subscriptions? -- would seem to make it even less useful.
- Brian Sullivan
@coldbrew - Obasanjo is right. We interviewed Mr Tweet on net@night some weeks ago, and he talked about the difficulty in creating a recommended list. Defining influence is very difficult. Mr. Tweet's blog post on this subject is excellent: http://bit.ly/LaKdz
- Leo Laporte
I'm going to have to agree with Brian, as subscriptions go up so does everyone's popularity, this is the antithesis of scalable.
- James
Hi Leo, good to see you up and arguing this topic! Just like everyone else, we were of course stunned to see the sudden rapid increase by some people. Initially, I thought it was Twitter's recommendations, but I thought it HAS to be circle of spammers after i noticed that you, scoble, etc were essentially not moving at all. Only recently then I realized that Twitter was probably selecting a group of people (about 50?) and recommending them. Anyway, we are still working on improving accuracy, it is hard! ;)
- ming yeow
(Ming Yeow IS Mr Tweet, by the way!)
- Leo Laporte
I mean this one thing is not going to bring them down. And a service like this has to have financial support, either through monetizing or being purchased by Google. So what will bring it down? I love FriendFeed, but it feels like a different space than this. It's like you need all of them and FF aggregates them. AOL was too closed. Myspace was too open. So whats the answer? Whether its Twitter or not, this is its own space.
- Stephen Pickering
These conversations have been pretty long on here ... friendfeed is becoming the newsgroups and forums of the past
- Nick O'Neill
@loic: Twitter is broken and we all know it. But we muddle along anyway. Bring us better tools so we can view groups we care about.
Gordon Montgomery, Damian Holmes, Hayes Haugen and 31 other people liked this
And of course first you'd have to turn Friendfeed into an app that could actually function as a direct replacement for Twitter.
- Ken Sheppardson
The "feature" that FF is missing that twitter has is reduced feature set and limits in the face of performance issues.
- Andy Bakun
FriendFeed should buy Twitter and move all Twitter users to FriendFeed. FF is far better than Twitter
- Waldemar Schott
Twitter is probably worth alot more than FF at this point, especially with the recent explosion in users.
- Matyjas
Maybe Twitter should buy FF, throw their site away and put FF on twitter.com
- Waldemar Schott
Is twitter broken ? No - it is saturated because it was overhyped. When people stop looking for the next big thing and realize that all of these tools that come along are just another nice thing to have in our toolbox the hype will die down. Until then people are going to keep racing to see who has the most followers.
- Patrick Allmond
Patrick: Twitter is broken in many ways. The community there no longer has integrity. Why does Veronica have 115,000 followers, most of whom are spam, while her boyfriend, RyanBlock has 13,000 followers (Ryan used to run Engadget and should have way more followers than Veronica should). I'll tell you why: the system is corrupted and broken. And we won't even go near the fail whale problem.
- Robert Scoble
Maciej: well, are we counting all the fake users in the explosion, or real ones? I'm not sure anymore. I can demonstrate that new accounts lately are heavily fake. Twitter's executives seem not to care about this issue.
- Robert Scoble
I don't think Twitter is broken, but I do think it is reaching the end of its life. I wrote about it more sensibly: http://blog.jamesmarshall.org.uk/2009...
- James Marshall
I think "broken" is a strong word...changing yes.
- John Flynn
John: Twitter is broken, it's just that you haven't seen the damage. I've shown it off on other threads if you care.
- Robert Scoble
James : you joined Twitter in Nov08, have done almost nothing on it (like follow lots of cool people) and yet somehow you seem to think you know a lot about twitter. strange.
- Alensa
Alensa: +100
- Robert Scoble
+1, Alensa! (oh, Robert beat me, and by two orders of magnitude. Too slow on the draw! *grin*)
- Ken Kennedy
Robert, Social media is "broken". Not only twitter... And until the web sees and understands efforts of people like Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Messina, Tantek... (and very humbly mines) it will remain broken. I mean it's not a "technological" issue, it's a design one.
- directeur
directeur: innovators get rewarded often in other non-credit ways. But I agree with you. By the way, the fact that you know all those people demonstrates that they are getting SOME credit. I follow all of them and share anything remarkable that they do, by the way.
- Robert Scoble
directeur: some social media is more broken than others. Twitter takes the easy coding route out of problems and it costs us all. That's why you see the fail whale so often (more than 10,000 times more often than I see it here on friendfeed) and why they have corrupted their communities through poorly-thought-out features. @ev does this, though. He spends "just enough" to make a service highly profitable. Did that with Blogger too. I can't blame him for taking the low road. It pays off.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I agree, they're getting "some" credits and they deserve it A LOT. Maybe, you and me, know them because of our common and particular interest in these subjects... But, trust me, most people don't know yet what "attention" or "microformats" are, thus those efforts remain invisible to the masses. And since startups success is first about getting the "average user's" satisfaction, people who manage these startups don't really care about innovation and innovators :(
- directeur
Robert, I agree also about the "low road", and that's what I'm saying in my precedent comment too. I've worked with a highly successful marketer and one thing he thougt me is: Don't try to be smart, just sell!
- directeur
directeur: I think smart does sell eventually. Word gets around that one system has integrity, another is corrupted. It does matter in the long run. In the short run, though, Twitter will make lots of profit, just like Blogger did. Blogger never worked well for me. Always was slow, both before Google bought it and after. And always had lots of spam. Sounds a lot like Twitter, doesn't it?
- Robert Scoble
The only thing I would add to Robert and directeur's conversation (which I agree with in whole) is that "groups" is a flawed concept. It relies on you adding people to your social graph... then grouping them out into contexts. I would argue that the context (subject, topic, event) comes FIRST - conversation comes second and adding the person to your social graph comes last. The challenge with Twitter (and to a lesser degree FF) is that the social graph is the only way to discover content (and people)...
- Brian Roy
Robert, you just nailed it! Smart sell "eventually" and in the long run. Let's hope that FriendFeed -which still lacks some more smartness like: Attention Profiling- will be to twitter what Wordpress is to Blogger :)
- directeur
Brian: friendfeed is a friend discovery system. Here, try it out. If you "like" a friend's item that I've never seen before all of a sudden that item and your friend is put into my view. But I agree with where you're going. We need even better systems. Search is one way, but we still need more ways to find the really great content out there.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, one word and I know people hate me because I'm repeating it a lot: APML :) Seriously, we've discussed this a lot, you and me, and I know that you do care. Brian is right. This is what FriendFeed lacks. Sharing, rating, finding people AND content with "interests" (Personal interests) is the way to go. I've tried with Feedego (remember, you tweeted it) NoiseRiver, and now SocialWhois. But ironically one NEEDS "popularity" to get "attention" on ATTENTION :)
- directeur
No, we don't need to complexify Twitter. Just make alts and have some of them with a very small group to reduce clutter and others to surf the noise.
- Prokofy Neva
directeur: you should put URLs to all of your projects. I just never took to your stuff for some reason. But, yes, you're right. Attention breeds attention. :-)
- Robert Scoble
directeur - Enable popular contexts (like I'm trying to do with Peter Himmelman's Furious World http://furiousworld.com). People interested in the context will aggregate there, discover one another, and the power of the social graph actually gets utilized to add more interested people to the context. Sorry (but not really) for the shameless plug.
- Brian Roy
Robert - I agree - FF has better discovery tools than Twitter. But is certainly doesn't make context based discovery easy. This isn't about search... it is about participating in real time conversations about topics you are interested in.
- Brian Roy
Brian, I totally agree on both suggestions! Kuddos to your efforts on the furiousworld project too! I'm getting some nice and kind noise about it and wish you a great success with it! Please let me know if I can help in any way! I'm a bit overwhelmed lately but i'll very gladly work with you on these subjects :)
- directeur
Brian: give me an example of what you want to do. I have lost the context and need to understand more about what you're thinking of.
- Robert Scoble
Robert - There are two live examples today - One at http://ushealthcrisis.com and one a http://furiousworld.com - These are destinations about specific topics. Tools to "tune" Social Media (Twitter/FF) so that on that site you get JUST stuff about that topic (signal) and can engage in conversation with other interested people. The magic is it is still public... so my social graph sees that I'm talking about - for example HIPPA, and can come join the conversation...
- Brian Roy
I get to discover new interesting people talking about subjects I find interesting... the site owner gets more traffic by leveraging my social graph... we all get rich conversation centered on specific topics (contexts).
- Brian Roy
In order for Twitter to be broken do you have to believe that, at some point, Twitter worked perfectly?
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
We're conditioned to use software that is broken. The thing is, Twitter works well enough for the people who use it.
- Victor Ganata
Mark: it worked better before February 6, yes. And at least I could trust the follower numbers as lame and petty as they might have been. But your point is a good one. Twitter has always been busted and yet we still use it.
- Robert Scoble
So, here's my prediction: As happens so frequently in web apps, there will be (is) a competitor that will be the successful one, and Twitter will be looked at as another IM service.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
Twitter runs my life.
- © b e e n s w a n k
I think the fact that twitter is "broken" inherently leads to more innovation as groups and individuals find their own ways to use the pure raw potential that's there.
- Amie Gillingham
The beauty of FF is that every person can create his own view of the content and people. Like Robert said, some people see FF as a friend discovery system but for me it's primarily a content agregator. Everybody can choose how they create and consume content. I don't follow too many people but on the other hand I love the friend-of-friend concept. Follow, unfollow, share, comment, like...
more...
- Tapio Kulmala
In the spirit of Mark's prediction - The SM aggregator/network that does the best job engaging the developer community to extend/add value to the offering will "win". None of them are doing a great job today (FF is best... Twitter is becoming openly hostile to DEVs, Facebook is only interested in getting content INTO FB).
- Brian Roy
It's ridiculous to think of SM as a zero-sum game. I bet there are a quite a few of us who use FB, Twitter, and FF all on a daily basis. I doubt any of us who do want any of them to disappear. You use the right tool for the right task, and for the right audience.
- Victor Ganata
I really wish hidden stories on FriendFeed didn't count towards the 30 item per page limit.
Chris Nixon, Dobromir Hadzhiev, Kol Tregaskes and 17 other people liked this
Me neithers! Very annoying.
- Yolanda
I don't think i've had more than 5 stories on a page in at least a month. Unsubscribing, removing from lists, turning off Friend-of-Friend doesn't help since everything I'm trying to get away from just appears in the hidden list because everyone else is liking and commenting on it. Ugh.
- Mark Trapp
Alex: is there a greasemonkey script that replaces http://friendfeed.com/ with that URL in every single instance?
- Mark Trapp
I don't use greasemonkey (nor even know what it is) so couldn't tell you one way or the other
- Alex Scoble
Also, hah: doing ?num=100 brings up the number of unhidden stories to twelve!
- Mark Trapp
Mark, try this - http://internetducttape.com/2008...
- B. Hatin
Friendfeed 100++ = that greasemonkey script http://userscripts.org/scripts...
- Hao Chen
You know Hao, your scripts never work in Fluid/GreaseKit, but this problem was annoying enough for me to figure out why. Removing the check you do (if(typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined')) makes it work in Fluid, so thanks! There were a bunch of other GM scripts you had that I always wanted to use: going through them now!
- Mark Trapp
Good to know, thanks.
- Hao Chen
Ah, doing some more research, the other hurdle is that GreaseKit removed all implementations of the GM_ functions for "security reasons." Which more or less makes any advanced GM script useless.
- Mark Trapp
Drat.
- Hao Chen
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