DISQUS

Rahsheen · 1 year ago

Great post.

Sounds like it was written by Steven Hodson, though. Very cranky :)

I like :)

Hutch Carpenter · 1 year ago

The concern for who you are following is definitely the right ethos. The point is to improve yourself by seeing what others find and think. Agree there.

For some people though, having a large audience is a part of their livelihood. That ready-to-go network of readers is quite valuable for entrepreneurs and bloggers. Remember the Rocketboom guy's faux sale of his Twitter account? The value wasn't in who he was following. It was in his number of followers.

tocaya · 1 year ago

I'm not sure if this blog post is based on what happened today in twitter. Another twitter contact told me that I should check your friend feed. I gotta say I am quite surprised. I am Tocaya. And I wrote the Tweet to a friend. I did not have any clue that it could be possible that they put your name on that.
But isn't it kind of ironic - my Tweet was referring on still inconsistent WebApps... This proves that some of them (such as Twitter) are more than just a little inconsistent. Freaky... ;-)

.. oh - and it is interesting how many people reacted on this... hehe

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Tocaya, I still have no idea why your Tweet ended up in my stream. I can only guess that Twitter is seriously borked right now and their DBs are all out of alignment.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

You're spot on with this one, of course, Cyndy. The DB problems with Twitter have slammed both the following and those you follow, and at least, with those following you, you have the option to get e-mail confirmation, while you don't when you choose to follow someone new.

I stupidly have all the "following" records in my e-mail because I never turned them off, and what's annoyed me especially about this crash is that it took place after a few weeks of visiting Twitter Karma and finally synching up. I don't want to do it again.

Eden · 1 year ago

Interesting that the number of followers is so important to so many, especially considering how easily one could fake it.

Louis · 1 year ago

You nailed it, excellent post. Twitter is/was a real-time class to attend when there was some extra time. Learning from O'Reilly, Monkchips, others, is/was excellent.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Ah... two Louis posters. That'll be confusing. Cyndy did a great job, and I absolutely agree with her here. Maybe it's because the # of followers is seen as a badge of achievement, while those you follow is not an ego trip. Just about the only place where people do use the amount they consume as a badge is highlighting how many RSS feeds they have.

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 1 year ago

LG - It's interesting you draw that parallel. I was just working on a future post about "what's your currency" focusing on the idea that so many look to who's watching them as an indication of success.

Jon-Paul Busoli · 1 year ago

BTW. Does anyone else find it ironic that they are building their following list back from their friendfeed contacts? That is what I'm having to do.

philbaumann · 1 year ago

You're mostly right, although some of us are actually interested in the human beings we follow and who follow us. Not all of us are interested in ego-boosting via the numbers game. I've recently just started getting some following and I was just developing interesting relationships with those good folks. Fortunately, I don't pay Twitter a fee, so I'm not up in arms about the situation. It happens, especially with Twitter.

There's nothing new about ego-pumping, Louis. It's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years and it will go on as long as human beings are around. Blogging about it won't change that. In fact, it just feeds right back into the ego junkies' drama.

This latest Twitter problem isn't about A-listers with fragile egos. (It's not always about A-listers, Twitterati or Twitterati Wannabes!) Today's problem also affected the authentic and 'ordinary' folks who care about the reliability of service that can connect good people together. That's a story I'd like to see covered more often in blog discussions.

tocaya · 1 year ago

@philbaumann: the last paragraph I liked the most. I'm trying out Twitter since merely 2 weeks and I just can see a sense in Twittering when one can rely on authenticity of tweets. See what happened today - I posted a statement, my own opinion - and it appeared with Louis Gray's name. No matter if this was his opinion or not. This way, applications like Twitter do not make sense. No reliability, no credibility.

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 1 year ago

philbaumann, I would agree that is the intent of Twitter, and other social media platforms, but I think Twitter can often fall short - not because of the rampant outages (even though this is a contributing factor), but because of the technology itself.

Sure there are ego in play, and that annoys me a bit, but I agree that this has been around and will not stop just because I write on it. Rather I am perturbed that the desktop clients are not nearly as real-time as I would like, simply b/c this particular platform cannot handle the massive load.

Aside from that, I often get frustrated b/c I cannot follow the string of conversations. If I am on this scene to meet other people - half the fun is in mingling - not having an isolated conversation with 1 author... like here...

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 1 year ago

... I can mingle with a crowd and enjoy the flavors each commenter brings to the dance!

BTW... great thoughts.

gregorylent · 1 year ago

i think twitter bongs will be showing up soon, packed with twitter special blend ...

i see one of those little turquoise lower case t's, and i groan ... they better redo the graphics when/if they get stable ...

Derrick Burns · 1 year ago

Well, I suppose at least some good has arisen from the steaming wreckage of the crash-landed FailWhale: us pathetic wannabes can now strap on an air of indignant outrage and carry our low (or non-existent) follower counts with the bitter pride of war wounds, and take a breather from trying to get our numbers up.
Facetiousness aside, though, I think you're spot on. If there's any part of this social media circus that's worth anything at all, it's the facility for communication and mutual edification, not in the inbuilt mechanism for arbitrary ego-stroking.
Besides which, as a commenter pointed out earlier, follower counts are so easily faked as to be meaningless anyway.

Matthias Schwenk · 1 year ago

Is it only about followers? When I look at Twitter I do not only miss some 30 persons who used to follow me, but also another 30 persons I was subscribed to. Will Twitter bring back my subscriptions? And when?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Cyndy's comments, echoing mine, are that this issue is not about losing followers, but losing total connections, including those subscriptions whom I had found over the last six or so weeks, whenever the DB was rolled back to. My article from last night talked primarily about going from 1500 or 1600 I was following down to less than 700. The concerns she states is that a lot of people wear their number as a badge, and she suggests it's not that big a deal.

As for when Twitter fixes this... who knows? It's clear they're trying to fix it ASAP.

Bryan Woods · 1 year ago

Word. Up. I'm glad I don't have to sit down and right this exact blog post now.

turoczy · 1 year ago

Just piling on to say thanks for this thoughtful post. I am far more concerned about the people I follow than the folks following me. You captured that sentiment very well.

Richardatdell · 1 year ago

Hi Cyndy,
I lost alot of people I follow who I depend on as part of an early alert system around the web, as well as for conversations, as you note. I also lost a lot of followers. For me the issue goes beyond your blog post and is impacting my ability to do my job and work with customers on the web.

Part of my work includes dealing with Dell customers and working on their computer/support issues. It also involves connecting with customers to share information or point them in the right direction as it relates to their questions. Twitter has become a key tool I use to build direction connections and relationships with customers.

In addition, the DM functionality is crucial as we get into matters that involve knowing customer service tag numbers etc. That information is protected under our own privacy policies, which is why the DM function and the following/follower issue is crucial to the work I do on the web.

My lost follow and followers, as well as Twitter's overall reliability these days impacts my ability to do my job and stay in touch with customers -- just a perspective that goes beyond some of the issues you raise

Merredith · 1 year ago

I agree; and @Corvida (oops; sorry, Twitter's down - http://shegeeks.net) also shares a fairly balanced perspective on this. I've been a bit surprised by the bandwagons of Cassandras forecasting Twitter's doom. It's a web app, hello -- and as Cyndy points out so eloquently, its true value lies in the relationships, the conversations, and the discoveries I couldn't make on my own; my problem is, sometimes I don't know whether some of those conversations came about because I followed them, or they followed me. Hopefully it will sort itself out.

geechee_girl · 1 year ago

I didn't hear many people ONLY bitching about the follower count. Many of us were bitching about BOTH sides of the equation - the conversation as a whole. Who were you listening to that was so one sided? I mentioned BOTH numbers I'd lost (826 to 552, 700+ down to 541) and the fact that I'd had spammers added that I'd already blocked. Not only THAT, i took a couple of hours to find out who was gone from the people I follow and add them and looked, only to see the number of people *I* follow? Had NOT MOVED after all that. See, I can feel my rant about Twitter from earlier today building up again... off to go do something Zen...

Phil Boiarski · 1 year ago

I lost people I was following and hated that. I also lost friends who follow my poetry posts and that sucks, too. Not as much, agreed. (Since poetry is one letter away from poverty, I didn't get into this for fortune or fame.) However, loss at either end of a network is bad customer service period. You can look down your nose at people who have followers but it is not about "self-impotance" for some. For me, at least, I find new friends, new eyes and ears (hungry for something other than Cha-ching!) and bring poetry into a place that is full of the mundane. In fact, most of my poetry is about how extraordinary the most ordinary thing can be.

Dan Thornton · 1 year ago

From what I witnessed, the opposite was true - there was concern over losing follows, mainly because they had been carefully picked. And far less concerns over losing followers, because the loss could be spam followers.

Lumberg · 1 year ago

It isn't about Ego. Think of your Twitter followers as your customers. You work hard to earn them, they select you, you don't select followers.

So if all of a sudden your customers are reduced significantly (in may case from 48 to 28), it can be a big deal. Especially if those followers turn into real contacts for real business and real meaning.

It is not about ego, it is about losing people you care about (either professionally or personally).

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 1 year ago

Cyndy, great post on this... I wrote a post some time ago, mainly about Plurk (when it first hit), and simply stated that I felt like Twitter was increasingly becoming full of ego-seekers. For a time, I played one of them (self-admission), but I have sense come to my senses and re-aligned my goals and my morals ;-)

วังน้ำเขียว · 2 weeks ago

วังน้ำเขียว But isn't it kind of ironic - my Tweet was referring on still inconsistent WebApps... This proves that some of them (such as Twitter) are more than just a little inconsistent. Freaky... ;-)