Why are so many culling their follow counts?

I thought it time to trim out the deadwood among those I follow on twitter today:: Those who have stopped tweeting, or who have shifted channel, or turned out not to be the interesting folk I thought they may be initially, etc.

image via http://www.charlesstone.com

In the process I spotted a disturbing trend. Using one of the many twitter management tools I found several people who I follow and quite regularly engage with, who don't follow me.
I'm not talking about the 'too much attention to cope with' folk, the @stephenfrys  or @bbcbreakingnews of this world (for example), I'm talking more the moderately interesting or those who may have done a lot of conference speaking, or (heaven forfend, and trust me, I'm aware of the risk in every word of this, those who have puiblished a book). It's not that they aren't simply following me back (quelle domage), it's that they appear to be following almost nobody.
I mean if you are following sub 500 and your follower level is closer to 50,000, well something seems to have gone wrong there.
For a start, that doesn't happen organically. You take the decision to cull.
Some may do it for ego and aesthetic reasons - look at the ratio on that!
Most would wrap this in the reason of 'signal versus noise'.
Which is just so much bs unless you happen to be using twitter 24/7 and have text alerts pinging on your phone each time you get an @message. I need back up in case I miss the thing that's important to me being tweeted or retweeted. 3000 folk gives me that cover. Always has so far.
It also gives me diversity. If I don't open up to outliers, how will I see the extreme moments that often have the most impact on our world (the Black Swans for those of an Anti-fragile bent).
I've always tried to follow back pretty much everyone who follows me. But even  in this I have started to hit a limit. Mine is around 3000. If I start following more than that I go seeking to clear out some deadwood - the folk who are not, or hardly ever, contributing to my time line.
And this is where I find it odd that folk with big follower numbers to feed (for surely their's is a broadcaster-audience relationship) feel that they can learn enough about their world from following less than 500 folk to provide a credible curation.
I salute their ability to select. I salute their trust in those they choose. I salute the trust their audiences confer on them.
But I can't help thinking they are helping to accelerate Twitter towards being the place where broadcast and self-promotion dominates rather than a place where adhoc communities of purpose form to get things done (which remains its promise).
Culling those you follow is - in extremis - like limiting your view to that from a prison cell. Why volunteer for that?
I would be delighted to hear from people who have taken this radical approach (culling those they follow) to reduce their exposure to noise or for whatever reason they have, and how it'
s working for them.
But until I hear a very good case I'm going to stick with the theory that one extra node on your network doubles its value: and that this 2n proposition can only happen if the connection between nodes is two-way.

Facebook's journey to monopoly or bust

I have no objection to the nice chaps at Instagram getting a billion dollars for their baby. Providing someone, somewhere on the planet is putting a similar sum behind a platform to make real change that matters.

Not happening though is it?

There’s something fundamentally wrong about a world where we’ll spend $1bn on an app but not on a way of creating value we can all benefit from. The key wrong bit is in the allocation of resource.

Projects like kickstarter point the way ahead. Resource allocation is shifting to the edge. And the edge won’t choose apps – we’ll choose change.

Which means The edge is unlikely to choose Instagram’s acquirer Facebook either. Big central blocks of cash might (the institutional investors). The odd geek shareholder? Perhaps. But for the most part, the edge won’t play.

Facebook paid $1bn for Instagram, not for a company, not for a business, (there is irony in the fact that Kodak, creators of the Instamatic, are now dead and buried as a business) but for an idea that threatened its dominance of the important image-storing/sharing sector.

Our concern should be that Facebook appears to be so 'valuable' now that it can simply buy the next idea that challenges it – at almost any price. And that’s a significant step on the road to monopoly.

But Facebook only gets to do this based on a valuation of itself which is in turn based only on the idea that it is valuable.

It’s buying ideas at inflated prices based on the idea that it itself is valuable.

That worries me in a very credit-crunchy kind of way.

When our collective belief in that is diffused by the realisation that communities don’t function like audiences then that bubble will deflate.

There is a more hopeful scenario – it is that Zuckerberg has the foresight to think acquiring creative connectors of the kind who ‘love’ Instagram has a potentially higher value for co-creating outcomes (rather than 'audiences' of folk sitting around waiting to be advertised at). And he can build a new, real, co-created and sustainable valuation around that idea.

I’m not holding my breath.

I guess it’ll be Pinterest next:  $2bn to Google anyone? Seems as good a fit as any to me.

If my daughter’s use of the web is any guide then Google needs to get Pinterest-hot at visual search as soon as it can. At 7 and reading and writing fluently,  she continues to search the web through pictures – just as she has ever since she first started playing with search. A pointer for the future.

See also: Facebook Should Be Working Harder for its $100b valuation

Community defined? You can't take part without creating part of it

My buddy Badgergravling got me thinking with a question on twitter this morning.

I don't know the 'why' of what he wants to know at the moment ( "Still researching content creators vs audience figures/ratio...anyone got examples/figures etc?") but the question itself made me think about our definitions, and valuation, of community.

Wikipedia and YouTube provide great examples of products made entirely from user generatated content. The question often thrown at them is "yeah but, how many people create content compared to those who simply consume it?"

The answer is thought to be a consistently low number (1%?) who contribute while 99% consume. I'll gladly update this with more accurate stats if you happen to have them.

Let me be clear. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.

Of course, it could achieve twice the scale and value should another 1% of the consumers become creators. But then, the theory goes, each time you double the number of creators, you'll scale up the number of consumers, too. That means the ratio of creators to consumers will remain static. Let's call it 1:100 for the sake of argument.

So, the more people who join the community by creating, the more 'audience' you'll grow. Clearly worth getting the tools of creation right then? If nothing else the audience gets to connect with the community through repeated exposure... and that drip-drip effect may inspire some to cross the theshold from audience to community.

All good, of course.

What made me pause for further thought was the fact that I was having this discussion on twitter.

Without creators there is no twitter. Same with YouTube or Wikipedia of course.

But twitter is made with communities of creators as its primary concern, not for consuming viewers. It is built for communities of purpose to form in a networked conversation-driven way, not for an audience to consume what they are creating. It's about small numbers sharing their conversations.

SecondLife follows that formula, too.

In both cases you can't take part without creating part of it.

I'm not about to claim there's no value in products which mix creation with consumption - YouTube and Wikipedia stand as testimony to the folly of that line of argument.

But I do think this raises questions about how uniformly we can apply laws of creator/consumer ratios. The purpose of the tools has a huge influence on this.

I imagine there are some twitter users who only 'follow' (ie only read the content others have created). But I'll make a wild guess: That number is way closer to 1% than the number of people who create content on twitter is.

In really community-focused models (from the architecture up) the creator/consumer ratio is likely to get turned on its head.

And that clearly hasn't done any harm to the likes of SecondLife and Twitter.

So being part of a community is to take part in creating it. All the rest is broadcast - sharing the community's metadata with a world of self-selecting potential members.

It means of course that twitter must come up with a monetising solution which fits the networked world. Can't wait to see which way they jump.