Thanks to you and Chris for opening a timely and interesting conversation on this topic even though we are in disagreement about some of this - what I think I'll be blogging soon as "Twitter elitism". Along these lines I've also been calling for a "blogging revolution" in the same vein to avoid the growing challenge of A list bloggers "sticking together", esp. with respect to linking, which has too often confined the conversations too narrowly. I'm hoping this "A list" problem will be self correcting without a revolution because I'm too lazy to lead that anyway.
Although I agree that nobody should dictate how others use social media, I'm definitely in what one might call the Scoble camp of "massive friending" because I think that approach is the most consistent with the new social media sensibilities and against what I see as a *huge* growing threat to blogging which is the old type of legacy media elitism where a limited number of influential voices define the conversations. More than anything I want new media to do something old media could not do - open the conversation to everybody and expose everybody to new perspectives and ideas.
I'm obviously not recommending folks friend somebody who is marketing to them in ways they don't like or abusive or other annoying things, but I guess I am suggesting that a very cool aspect of Twitter is the ability to get a sense of the pulse of a smart community as it swirls on the web - without following a lot of people you lose out on this intriguing aspect of Twitter although I supposed you could spend time at the "public" timeline for that. However as I moved from following small to large numbers I found there was also a neat aspect of feeling part of a very positive community experience.
I should caveat this with the fact that a lot of the current growth in Twitter seems to be in the PR and Marketing sectors. To the extent folks are only friends so they can pitch MLM schemes the massive friending may break down but I think we'll find that problem regulates itself as "selfish" users will lose friends or those communities will simply spin up among each other.
mlm prelaunch
· 7 months ago
A good conversation turned into a very informative self help. Nice!
sEARCH eNgiNE oPTIMisation
· 6 months ago
Social networking sites should not be the first tools you turn to, however. .... MySpace and Facebook offer easy-to-use tools that will help you set up a ...
All Comments
Although I agree that nobody should dictate how others use social media, I'm definitely in what one might call the Scoble camp of "massive friending" because I think that approach is the most consistent with the new social media sensibilities and against what I see as a *huge* growing threat to blogging which is the old type of legacy media elitism where a limited number of influential voices define the conversations. More than anything I want new media to do something old media could not do - open the conversation to everybody and expose everybody to new perspectives and ideas.
I'm obviously not recommending folks friend somebody who is marketing to them in ways they don't like or abusive or other annoying things, but I guess I am suggesting that a very cool aspect of Twitter is the ability to get a sense of the pulse of a smart community as it swirls on the web - without following a lot of people you lose out on this intriguing aspect of Twitter although I supposed you could spend time at the "public" timeline for that. However as I moved from following small to large numbers I found there was also a neat aspect of feeling part of a very positive community experience.
I should caveat this with the fact that a lot of the current growth in Twitter seems to be in the PR and Marketing sectors. To the extent folks are only friends so they can pitch MLM schemes the massive friending may break down but I think we'll find that problem regulates itself as "selfish" users will lose friends or those communities will simply spin up among each other.