DISQUS

Josh Young · 6 months ago

Funny you should call for a PageRank for twitter! Because there actually is one already. It has an API, and it's at http://tunkrank.com/.

Check out the explanation of the algorithm by @dtunkelang here: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter....

Mark Allen · 6 months ago

I'm not trolling here, just trying to understand where you are coming from: How does the celebritization of Twitter hurt the way you use the service? I've read all of your previous posts on the topic, and can't figure out how Ashton Kutcher having 1 million+ followers in any way affects you. The only thing I can guess is that you are upset Twitter is telling people they may be more interested in what AK has to say than yourself. Which is (sadly) true. It would be nice if Twitter had better discovery features so people who might be interested in what you have to say could find you, but you can still do the same things you did pre-SUL to find new people and let other people find you.

To say that people on the SUL haven't earned their follower count is ridiculous. Oprah has spent years building her community of followers, so it only makes sense for them to gather together on Twitter when they have the opportunity. And no offense, but a single mention of Twitter by her is more of an "investment" in the service than anything you, Scoble, or Guy have ever done. That's not a knock against you, just a testament to the the enormous reach she has.

userX · 6 months ago

The SUL has distorted the "natural" process of discovering information -- and the creators / disseminators of that information -- that previously existed on Twitter. I think the idea is that there was a more or less "free market" for followers' attention that the SUL has now distorted.

The celebritization of Twitter is a separate matter. Oprah's popularity is independent of the Twitter platform. The SUL, obviously, is not.

h0h0h0 · 6 months ago

Completely and utterly true. The past couple months have spoiled a certain mystique of twitter without replacing the value. Typically we begrudge change but come to realize that it's changed for the better. In this case the change has really changed the eco system for the worse, without adding value to what was there.

I have changed and adapted with twitter over the past three years but it crossed a threshold with the recent celebritization. I should really say, I'm still open for what the platform might evolve into next. My usage of the platform has survived many things, including the swampland of real-estate mavericks and social media gurus. It has certainly become a myspace in a way, strong value that evolved into a mess of geocities like pages.

I think the next platform is twitter, stripped down with more ability to control the incoming information.

Shaun Farrugia

dave · 6 months ago

It might have made it through the "celebritization" if they hadn't mucked up follower-count the way they did. Let the celebs earn their followers, however they do it -- with CNN contests, billboards, whatever. It was Twitter screwing around with the whole thing that made it an unfixable mess.

b_calder · 6 months ago

Why not check to see if it would be trivial to identify the effect and filter it out? Are there really that many people with over ten thousand followers? At any rate, Twitter would never be a primary mathod of validating authority. It woudl only serve to float some medium-sized boats.

PXLated · 6 months ago

Hey Dave...
Is ReTweeting a useful count - How many times a persons tweets are passed on?
Or could someone start a count - @dave:Auth=8 - An authority rating (1-10) is submitted as a Tweet and an average is used to build a rating?

dave · 6 months ago

I don't think it's going to happen on Twitter. Could be wrong about
that, just seems that way to me.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 10:59 AM,

omouse · 6 months ago

That's too simplistic. Any authority/reputation model has to take multiple factors into account otherwise it can be gamed very easily.

PXLated · 6 months ago

Maybe but a lot of things get too complex and nobody uses them. I'll take simplicity over complexity.

omouse · 6 months ago

You can hide the complexity. Have a single visible score, but then in the back end you're still factoring different variables.

PXLated · 6 months ago

Yes, Maybe - But so many complex things get more complex and out of control. The beauty of RSS was simplicity and keeping it that way. A difficult thing to do and keep under control.

PXLated · 6 months ago

Agree that it probably won't happen within Twitter but couldn't the second method only use Twitter for the transport/vote part of the equation and the Auth Rating be built into 3rd party clients, essentially skirting Twitter?

terrycojones · 6 months ago

Hi PXLated

That's what I'm trying to get at with my comments on FluidDB. The 3rd party holds arbitrary other (meta, if you like) data and also points to the tweet or tweeter in question. If you do it right, the 3rd party info cannot be gamed, and yet everyone has an equal voice.

BTW, you might enjoy the comments on metadata and Twitter in the last part of this article by Nova Spivak (of Twine):

http://www.twine.com/item/123c9051b-g8/can-twit...

dave · 6 months ago

Thanks for the info about your product. From this point on people can
go to your site for more.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 1:24 PM,

Mark Essel · 6 months ago

Dave, I understand your sentiment and loss of faith in the follower count/authority system. It has been corrupted. But don't allow what has happened to affect how you view your follower. The folks that tune into your message are still interested, and they have faith in your perspective regardless of whether your relative follower count is lower than some arbitrarily boosted suggested users.
I use twitter as a bidirectional message channel (only follow those who follow me back). But I use friendfeed much differently. I have user lists, filters, and community rooms that I use for getting the information I'm intersted in. I believe the like utility / count can serve as a status/community authority figure. Robert Scoble has written much praising the decentralized structure Paul Buchheit and team have designed.
One great functionality is the ability to have working friendfeed interfaces on my blog site, it really adds value to the page with dynamicly updated information.

terrycojones · 6 months ago

Hi Dave. I so often feel we should talk... We're almost ready to do an alpha release of FluidDB, which will give you some of what you want: a level playing field, a way to do pagerank for people, something that can't be gamed, a way to add arbitrary metadata to tweets (and anything else), a way to search on all this, a system in which reputation and trust can evolve, and probably some other things you'd like (I can think of 2 others you've mentioned that it will also give you). It's built to address exactly those kinds of things. Interested?

Terry Jones (@terrycojones).

dave · 6 months ago

What is it?

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 12:11 PM,

terrycojones · 6 months ago

It's a hosted database. Designed to be writable by anyone (the model of information ownership and control is *very* important - as I think you'll agree), with a permissions system and query language, and usable among other things as something that can hold metadata on URLs. No one gets to set the rules, no one has to anticipate what others are going to want to do with information, no one can stop you from adding new content, it doesn't matter if you're late to the party, your data is on a completely equal footing with all other data in the system. And users are in there too, so you can add things to them like a Dave pagerank. You can add Dave's virtual currency to tweets (as you've suggested elsewhere). And there's more. All designed to work at web scale - not federated, at least not yet. I'm terry \at\ jon . es if you want to send mail.

dave · 6 months ago

I don't understand why someone would use this.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 12:31 PM,

omouse · 6 months ago

It sounds similar to overlays. So your Dave pagerank is just an overlay on top of the data. The reason to use this is that you could probably share those overlays with someone else, and you could also take bits and pieces of different overlays and combine them into something new. He would be correct, no one would set the rules because none of the overlays would be definitive (unless the users chose a particular overlay to be definitive).

Though I don't understand exactly how they're setting up a database and user permissions for that...

dave · 6 months ago

If everyone else were using it, sure. That's the problem with all the
other answers, you have to get people to use them before they matter.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 12:41 PM,

terrycojones · 6 months ago

I'm not so pessimistic. You've several times come up with measures of twitter users (and maybe tweets). You've suggested it would be nice to add to Twitter's database:

"The ability to attach data to the user's account stored on twitter.com would neatly solve the problem" (From http://bit.ly/74M2p)

We'll give you a way to do those things. It matters already - your voice already matters. We're just providing a place to put information that makes it more useful, and where you don't need to ask permission (or to be anticipated) to do so. It matters to me, because I'd like to consume your information in various ways. Two people are enough. One is probably enough.

terrycojones · 6 months ago

@onmouse

Yes, that's all basically correct.

> Though I don't understand exactly how they're setting up a database and user
> permissions for that...

Here's the video of a talk I gave recently at the Postgres Conference in Ottawa http://bit.ly/gM6I0 We've been working on this for years - not an easy thing to build.

terrycojones · 6 months ago

Because it gives you a useful place to put information. Useful in that it can be searched on, combined, augmented, etc.

E.g., you recently computed the number of NYT followers Twitter users had. You could put that number onto an object for that twitter user. Then the rest of us could use your efforts, say by a query asking for people with >4 NYT followers and who had not been on the SUL (just another tag that you might put onto users). Or see the suggestion on this page, of dave:auth = 8. Twitter aren't going to let you put a dave:auth tag & value into their database, but I'll let you put it into FluidDB (in fact I can't stop you, there is no way to stop you). That's very useful, because I can then use your info: I can have an RSS feed on people dave gives a dave:auth rating to of > 5, who also have >3 NYT followers, who have not been on the SUL, and who I don't already follow. You, I, and anyone else who cares to, gets to arbitrarily mark up the world and consume information as we like. FluidDB provides a common shared architecture to support that. It means we don't need special pleading. We don't need to ask Twitter if they could please implement something - we can do it ourselves (and share/combine our personalizations).

Personalization is another way to look at it. You and I are both people who love to personalize our computational worlds. To take things into our own hands, to build little hacks to scratch itches, to share results, etc. FluidDB gives you an architecture into which you can put all these idiosyncratic pieces of information - you can protect them, share them with others, search on them, consume things in any way you like, add anything you like, etc.

I hope that seems clearer....

Terry

webovator · 6 months ago

What are you TALKING about? I am so lucky that Twitter finally showed me the way. If it weren't for SUL, I would not be following Dustin Diamond, Soleil Moon Frye, Ashton Kutcher, Neil Gaiman, or TheRealGunther!

(Okay, only PART of this was sarcastic, because I actually DO follow 2 people on this list, one of which was NOT a suggested user).

Over all, great post. I don't think FluidDB will catch on soon, because it sounds like it has a high learning curve. But, I do think it's worth the effort. "F--- the naysayers, 'cause they don't mean a thing" ~ 311, All Mixed Up

Jim Mitchem · 6 months ago

The Updates/Followers/Following numbers in Twitter are completely useless. The only field with any relevance is the Direct Messages, so you know if you've received a new one. Even the trending topics are useless anymore since the people I follow don't tend to do the #3senselesswords games.

Richard Reeve · 6 months ago

While I continue to benefit from a network of folks I on twitter, I watched in horror in March as the follower counts went nutty, noticing it first with Ev's account. I didn't realize it was simply the SUL, but I knew something was up. Having put 6 months of work into building the kind of network that seemed "A" level based on the "game" as it was played last fall, watching it become so rapidly inconsequential really ticked me off at first.

In the end, I think Twitter did me favor. The last thing I want to be caught up in is the type of fad celebrity personas they are promoting. Now as a communication tool, I still have my reasons to work away in this format. As those SUL accounts continue to rapidly climb by the 100,000's, I plod along with my system of gaining a hundred here, a hundred there...and for every new thousand followers, I remain grateful for connecting with on average 10.

The thing that bothered me even more was that up until about the same time Twitter Search would reach back seemingly indefinitely. That clearly is no longer the case. The loss of the public record (perhaps they plan on monetizing it) really took the wind out of my twitter sails...Of note is that I've fed my twitter stream into Friendfeed throughout and it all remains searchable over there... I'd have already jumped ship completely to Friendfeed, but really see no certainly that the same kind of BS won't happen over there.