Pondering Friendfeed and Twitter (maybe a little too much…)
Ruminations on Friendfeed after making my first “block”:
- Since Friendfeed allows for “fake follows”, should I just follow everyone who follows me? After all, I never need to see their updates.
- I finally understand the power of lists in Friendfeed. With every other tool, S/N ratios have to be controlled through manual curation of follow-lists. On Friendfeed, that’s never a concern.
- A classic sign on Twitter of “spammers” is someone with a huge “following” list. If I did start following 12000 people on Friendfeed would I become a “spammer” in someone’s eyes?
- If I was following 12000 people on Friendfeed, would that “cheapen” the “silent attention” that I pay to my friends lifestreams. In other words, would their assessment of my “ambient social awareness” be tainted by the thought “he can’t possibly keep up”. After all right now, a lot of conversations with my friends in real life slip between contexts of “on IM you said” and “on twitter I saw..”. Would that disappear if I was following 12000 people here because folks would assume I couldn’t have kept up?
- Am I plate-of-beans’ing this?
Related idea – Even though URLs on Twitter Profile Pages are no-follow, spammers follows millions to drive up SEO Rankings for URLs in their bios & names. Should Twitter: a) add noindex,nofollow o follower/following profiles? b) remove links to follower/following profiles for not-logged in users/search engine bots? c) remove bio or not-logged in users/search engine bots?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on June 16, 2009 at 6:34 pm Balaji Dutt wrote:
Folks – wanted to post this in Friendfeed itself, but I ran up against word-limits. In keeping with the spirit of the post, comments (if any) can be left on Friendfeed
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
on June 25, 2009 at 5:24 am Punk Rock wrote:
In my opinion, I think that Twitter is kind of a joke nowadays because of all the people trying to capitalize off of it. It’s become a giant piece of spam with no real value anymore. I think it is a great idea for personal use, but when companies are trying to use it for business purposes it always makes me laugh. This is a site where teen girls are talking about their crushes on the cutest backstreet boy, or whatever. I’m all for spam control, maybe just removing the spam types of urls could fix the problem. If you ask me, whoever is using it is just taking their own chances you know.