The point I was making wasn't about my ego, though. It was that most followers on Twitter don't engage and don't take action. So they are useless. People who just want to collect useless followers are the ones who have the real ego. :-) - Robert Scoble

take it easy on the new guy..lol - mohamedosman

Of course. I got your point, i was just giving you some ribbing about your ego. - Ryan Jones

Woah useless is a strong word Robert :) - Chris Saad

Chris: they are bots. Do you think bots are useful? - Robert Scoble

Well when you said followers I imagined people - but if you are talking about bots that's different - Chris Saad

The bot problem will go away as soon as the twitter sheeple stop blindly re-following everybody that follows them. - Ryan Jones

Deciding not to engage IS taking action. - Andrew Jordan

I don't think that the "Collect The Followers" issue is exclusive to Twitter though - and I'd expect FriendFeed to have exactly the same problem in the long run. I don't mind silent people following me, it's the uselessly-noisy ones that I don't care for. - Ian Betteridge

I love it! I have a huge ego, please discuss here. Bots are not useful, but are preventable. Bots couldn't take hold if we didn't autofollow them. ie: if we don't "bot" back - Chris Foley

That's not true! The Iranian election shows that people take action on Twitter. The point is that its less centralized because you can't have a single, collected repository for the actions taken/conversation. It's just more ad hoc and less engaged. But it also allows for more variety of responses because people aren't tied to a single conversation thread! - Steve Lynch from twhirl

If MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc took away the X has Y "followers, friends" number and removed the popularity competition too, it would help. - Ryan Jones

Note Scoble's profile... "I'm also the trouble maker..." Lol. - Nicole

To be fair, Ryan, I don't think Scoble's that interested in number of follows as an ego massage. I think from various conversations that it's more of an experiment in social media - he follows everyone and filters later. Others (like me) do it differently, but that's not to say his method isn't valid for him. - Ian Betteridge

Agreed, Ryan. I think the reality is that you don't really have 96,000 followers, Robert. A lot of those people are bots, spammers or people who don't use Twitter anymore. But why care so much about the numbers? - Steve Lynch from twhirl

The funny part is, as I type this.. at least 2 bots just re-tweeted scoble's last post with @RyanJones in it. - Ryan Jones

Chris: followers that don't "follow" aren't very useful. They also aren't really followers, are they? Maybe we need a new word "watchers" or "not fan, not follower, just want to watch the mess here." - Robert Scoble

As of 9:23 AM PST I have 1,846 Twitter followers. I am currently following 1,246 I receive DM's from about ten of these followers, and only one or two per day respond to my tweets. The rest are just "building their inventory", with an empty promise that this will give them some kind of credibility. So far, Twitter has been useful for contacting key participants in seminars, conferences and workshops. - Nicholas Chase

I think the word followers is MUCH MUCH better than 'Friends' - so is the async nature of Twitter and FF followers rather than Facebook 'Friends' - But i agree with your point that bots and spammers are not very 'useful' - Chris Saad

But then again, neither is a follower count to measure influence or engagement - a real influence metric is LONG overdue - Chris Saad

Steve: numbers are interesting because systems like WeFollow.com and many journalists use them. The world keeps forcing me to consider numbers. But I keep pushing back. Is having 50,000 unengaged followers really useful to anyone? - Robert Scoble

I think one of the more interesting numbers is how many people click the links you tweet. - Ryan Jones

Ryan: exactly. Engagement is interesting and engaged users are useful. I try to be useful to lots of other people. That's why I follow so many and I do what they tell me to do. That's how I ended up here, after all. Louis Gray told me to use friendfeed. It took me a while, but I did eventually listen. That's how you change the world. Having people who don't do anything following you isn't going to change anything. - Robert Scoble

The higher the number of people I follow the more difficult it is to weed out, information from noise, applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic desktop help, but they require constant tweaking. When I see an interesting tweet with link, I often click on link, but it is unusually for me to do an @ reply, if I think what I read is interesting I will post a comment. - Kim Landwehr

How would you know if any of them did anything or not. Just because they don't 'engage' in conversations doesn't mean they don't act on or read any of your posts or follow any of your links. You could be educating the masses without knowing it. Just carry on, and stop worrying about numbers. - Gilbert Harding

Gilbert: I've been telling people for years to come to friendfeed and discuss hundreds of different things with me. 42,000 have joined me here. That's less than half of my Twitter numbers. So, that tells me that half of them aren't engaged with me. Why are they following me if they aren't there to engage at some level at some time over a year? - Robert Scoble

I only follow people I find interesting, and because I'm a programmer, most of them are too. I don't want to follow people just to increase my numbers. - RobinDotNet

Robin: yes, most people are like you. But what about these other 50,000? :-) - Robert Scoble

Maybe they sign up and follow you and then never go on twitter again. Although I get follow requests from people who haven't tweeted ever. I don't understand it. I'm too busy to dick around and read tweets from thousands of people I don't have anything in common with. - RobinDotNet

I don't have a huge number of followers but over 60% of mine are people that I have met in real life and have a direct connection with. I don't go out of my way to follow someone unless I have had some previous contact with them. - Luke Kilpatrick

ego, I luv my ego! they r healthy ones - polou/indigo_bow

You know, I was kind of disappointed when FriendFeed added subscriber/subscribing counts to profiles in the new version. It was refreshing to have a service where numbers were underplayed. - Jared Smith

It really seems like the more followers I get on twitter, the less interaction. I'm almost to the point of not bothering following any more people - they rarely engage anyway. - Jannifer @wordsforliving

I just expanded on this conversation with a blog post: http://www.dotcult.com/why-twi... - Ryan Jones

Ryan: good blog on the topic. - Robert Scoble

Wow Robert I agree with ya... You challenge people and that's a good thing... Keep on doing what you do.. More people need to mix it up instead of trying to be the most popular eith followers... ha ha ha - Chris Henderson

Yes. Robert has an enormous one - WoH: Minding her Botts

Robert, I don't think you have the extroverted ego, others have. I will repeat the example I was just giving at the other post - When you first came to Israel, everyone could have a direct talk with you free of charge and without any PR interference (although i'm sure you could ask money for that), but this year, when Brian Solis is about to arrive, people need to pay a lot of money to have a chat with him - and frankly, this guy cannot teach me a thing. - Nir Ben Yona