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Here's an article in Mediaweek about the NY Times, and how they're using Twitter.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/new...
They say: "To date The Moment has built an audience of over 1.2 million followers on Twitter, due in part to the popular of the Times' tool."
Yes but "The Moment" is on the SUL.
http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom...
There aren't many accounts that have grown that large without the boost of being on the SUL.
The list is obviously of enormous benefit to participants - financially for blogs, newspapers etc - but you make a very valid point here. However, even if an acceptable rival list to the SUL was created, because Twitter's SUL is the first thing every new user sees when they sign up, nothing is going to change.
I'd love to see them take a positive step forward with this and be open about the benefits. Sell 250 spots at $1m/year and make the other 250 directly tailored to the new user, possibly by asking for a little more (private) profile information (interests, etc) when they join. $1m/year is a bargain now and will be super-cheap in 2-5 years when the 100th most-popular user on Twitter has 50 million followers.
I'm always thinking of Twitter as a chance to get really TARGETED info... and it cannot be easy to write tweets targeted to over 1 million followers :-)
However, if it's really the case, well that's just appalling!
It would have been far worse had they done it in response to a negative story, like an editorial saying twitter isn't worth their recent valuation.
Maybe if that happens people will start to see how much of an issue this could be in the near future
The case is interesting, but it's not about a blog post that Twitter “dislike”, it was a concerning case of divulging stolen information. I'm not blaming either: it does reveal the concerningly influence impact of the SUL, but should be considered as a natural experiment.
As soon as we've reached Web Net Neutrality, we have to fight for service neutrality. . .
http://twitter.com/opensul
then maybe twitter would add @openSUL to the SUL ;)
currently, though their is obvious value to easily attaining a huge horde of followers by being part of the sign-up process and on the SUL, i think it is moot when you begin to look for true value in the follow/follower/friend scheme/relationship... not only on twitter, but any social service. how different is this than the old competitive myspace friend counts and the fact that these people are not real "friends". thats what the smart folks would say about the silly kids on myspace... right? and now are we consumed with a similar predicament?
their is a large percentage of users who have little or no value... spammers, get rich quick marketing people, low-level advertisers, people that just dont get it, lurkers, pests and so on. these are the types of users that this conversation, and this concern..... includes.
then you look at the better users... the more "real people"... but why do most of us need to care if these users follow us? truth is, most users shouldn't care and many don't. if you do, you are probably using the service for the wrong reasons. you should be worrying about who you follow.. your curated river of news and messaging stream. not who follows you. if you are saying something of interest, you can be found. that's what all the searchability tech is for.
some of us have something to say. others just want to say something.
who do you think most of the millions of users are?
unless of course you are a business that is marketing or opening up to customers and so on and so forth. and that includes celebrities and politicians in my opinion. they are businesses, upselling and keeping fans happy, doing the transparency dance.
and the News industry... they are businesses... some trying desperately to survive and transform and become a stable hybrid of offline/online media. trying to stay relevant. the twitter SUL is important to them.... now. but i dont think it will remain valuable to them because a rapid shift is upon us. Dave is one of those leading this shift. so i DO like that Dave is pointing out how twitter and the SUL is flawed. it's an important observation, even if I myself am pointing out how it should not matter. i think the two perspectives essentially become one.
besides, twitter might be the new friendster.
Thanks for using your voice to expose one of the most unfair ranking system on the 'net. Leo Laporte, Scoble and yourself add massively more value to real people than 99.9% of the people on the SUL. The traffic the SUL generates for it's 'friends' gives them an massive, unfair advantage over anyone else in the same space.
Clearly, inclusion on the SUL is more about Twitter controlling the news than anything else.
Just look at what's happened to Mashable since it was added to the SUL. This 'social media' site is now giving massively more coverage to Twitter than any other platform. It sometimes reads like an unofficial Twitter blog.
The SUL is wrong in so many ways Dave. Ya know what though? There's nothing we can do about it.
We can route around it.
Since we know we can't trust any news outlet that allows itself to be bought this way, we have to create news outlets that refuse to be bought this way.
In an important way I trust TechCrunch more today than I did before July. I would trust them more if they deleted the account that got polluted with the SUL followers, but at least they're not feeding at the trough now.
the SUL is inline with business decisions, not federated platform decisions.
twitter fell into this success and are trying to find a balance in how they are perceived. they want to be considered the platform while they figure out how to monetize the massive attention.
the platform already exists. it's the open web. RSS, Atom and also email. maybe in a few years, Google Wave.
i like twitter. but you almost have to admit that the whole thing is laughable at this point.
it shows us that the river of news headlines is a popular mode of consumption.
but it all circles back to pre-existing architecture, prior art and the fundamentals of the internet.
no need to suffer through the growing pains of twitter just to make them more successful.
besides, they'll eventually get bought or lose momentum.
Yup, it clearly wrote something that Twitter didn't like. Actually, it published documents that a hacker had stolen from Twitter, where lawyers got involved. That's pretty high-profile.
That doesn't however close the loop of logic and indicate that publications that remain on the SUL are somehow "scared" of Twitter and thus writing "favourable" things.
And you still don't seem to have done the analysis of accounts that use bit.ly (so the stats are public) to see what *proportion* of clickthroughs those on the SUL get compared to those not on the SUL. I do. The contrast in the number of clickthroughs where you only have "organic" followers is stunning. Have a look at @newscientist, which isn't on the SUL. Then compare its clickthrough rate with any organisation on the SUL. After all, a follower who never clicks any of your links isn't much use, are they?
As I say, none of this has any bearing on the question of whether *being* on the SUL colours what's written. I can tell you it doesn't. And the case of TechCrunch shows that it clearly wasn't worried about whether it would remain on the SUL if it wrote something that got it into trouble with Twitter. So being on the SUL had no effect on what got written in that case.
You do need to show some evidence that it does before your case is made.
Accepting a gift from Twitter is value neutral in and of itself if your coverage never touches Twitter. I think your presence on the SUL is still distortive and makes follower comparisons in the Twitverse less useful. Personally and professionally I don't care at all about that, except that it's interesting to watch and learn from.
However, if being on the SUL is a gift you value, and if you are a journalist and cover Twitter or issues pertinent to anyone controlling Twitter's behavior as a company _being on the SUL similar within the Twitverse to having Ford buy advertising in the New York Times _every day_ for your independent Car Review magazine. Not certainly unethical, but certainly not above reproach. Personally - I care a lot about this. If the Twitverse gets really big, the problem grows with it, and its a real problem.
Twitter is pretending to be a Common Carrier but it's not behaving like one. Dave doesn't have to prove he's right for his point to be valid, Twitter and the beneficiaries of the SUL need to avoid the appearance of influence, and post transparent positions on the matter. If they don't, it is appropriate and I think wise to assume influence where it's both plausible and can't be easily ruled out. (charlesarthur points to necessary but insufficient information to rule out influence as I see it)
But if his point is valid, shouldn't it be quite easy to prove? There are loads of journalists and publications on Twitter; loads that aren't and some that are on the SUL. Shouldn't an analysis of what those who aren't on the SUL and those who are it write demonstrate quite quickly the effects of any "distortion"?
His assertion is a useful hypothesis: but the way to test a hypothesis is to see what it predicts, and then see if you can find that prediction confirmed. So far, no go. In short, yes, you do have to prove things for them to be perceived as valid. Else you descend into the madness of the birthers, where no proof is sufficient to demonstrate the falsity of their hypothesis.
"(charlesarthur points to necessary but insufficient information to rule out influence as I see it)"
Well, more precisely I point to an example (TechCrunch's hacker Twitter papers) which goes *completely against* Dave's hypothesis, and in a scientific context would come close to invalidating it. So I'm asking for examples that validate it. In other words, I'm arguing what scientists and statisticians call the null hypothesis: that presence on the SUL has no material effect on a publication's or journalist's coverage of Twitter. And yes, you do have to prove your point to shift things from the null hypothesis.
It may be a question of somewhat unshared context - but as I see it not all valid points for discussion are testable hypotheses, nor is each valid hypothesis easy to prove, and if they were that would be a bummer. As it happens, the squigyness that introduces is a far cry from the "there are no provable facts" madness of the birthers, nor is the slope to such madness so inflected or steep. I'm quite comfortable that I can get a good bit less scientific on this topic than I intend to, and still not even approach that madness :)
To your points about the subject at hand: I agree there is a further burden to prove influence, but I believe you have failed to disprove it. Dave's overall concern with SUL as I understand him is valid because a mechanism of plausible influence is directly observable. That doesn't mean I think every hypothetical in the post is proven - I don't get the sense in a quick re-read that Dave said so either.
I do think it's prudent to assume that any agent with a downside they are aware of will weigh that downside in every connected decision, so to me being on the SUL means a yellow flag on one's coverage of various issues where I need to think through if one may have been influenced - and that is annoying to me.
True, which often means you need to split it into smaller ones which you can prove, and build them up.
"I agree there is a further burden to prove influence, but I believe you have failed to disprove it."
I don't have to disprove it. Absence of influence is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis doesn't need to be proved; it's the default. You, or Dave if he chooses to, have to prove the presence of that influence. And I've offered an example that goes against the "influence" hypothesis: Techcrunch and the "Twitter papers".
It would be quite easy to find two British papers, one with an account on the SUL and one that is not, and analyse their content about Twitter and see if that demonstrates any influence. Or two US papers with the same differences.
Scientific process. It's great.
their presence on the SUL.
It's as unlikely as a member of Congress saying they're influenced by
campaign contributions from the pharmaceuticals, insurance or the
banking industries.
Right now, I assume most twitter users are simply unaware of the SUL distortions altogether.
to the list and asked to be removed, and was.
http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu.
I do the Rebooting The News podcast with Jay, http://rebootnews.com/,
and when I did that I was totally proud of him.
As far as I know he's the only person to do this.
Luca