Twitter micro-connections restored but does it matter?
Twitter had a technical glitch yesterday which resulted in users’ follower and followee numbers dropping dramatically. These micro-connections, often formed casually or spontaneously, created the illusion of being truly transient (albeit briefly).
The image above shows the drop in numbers for my Twitter account yesterday (245 > 194) which were then restored today (194 > 247). I used the website TwitterCounter (which tracks followers for a specific account) to produce the histogram.
Consequently, I was curious about whether Twitterers ever dropped or blocked their followers? I have seen users stop following people (or more common these days - news services) but how often are followers blocked from monitoring another’s stream?
The answer is probably rarely.
And here’s why I think that might be. A common view is that Twitter is a social platform but not a social networking platform. It’s primary function is as a social messaging service (which coindentally works as a good acronym) where followers/followees are collected on-the-fly. I agree with this view.
While it’s true people can already be connected in the physical world, through social network sites (SNS) like Facebook and Bebo, and more than likely re-connect again on Twitter, they are unlikely, however, to go to Twitter for the principal purpose of networking with someone. Other sites, like those mentioned above perform this function better.
This is not to say that people won’t find others with similar interests, points of view, experiences and so on (in fact they do) but rather their focus is likely to be on the message (all 140 characters of it) than who is connected to whom. Also, there is a public perception of popularity by the number of followers you have (see Robert Scoble for a huge, huge number) so why get rid of them?
The contents of the message itself can be revealing. Twitter has a minimal profile - which is a good thing. While other sites allow for a comprehensive profile, the content is usually static and the process of adding it, onerous. Twitter on the other hand, provides a dynamic and argubly more complete picture of someone through the aggregation of their tweets - certainly more current at least.
This is speculation because I haven’t tested this. However, you could conceivably compare someone’s profile on a SNS like Facebook with an aggregation of tweets at Twitter by using some kind of content analysis.
Wow, that’s kind of topic in terms of Twitterers ridding themselves of undesirable followers but still interesting (well to me anyway). Perhaps, another way to frame this could be, simply - what is the true value of having followers on Twitter?
Do you have a view?
Update: The absolute latest from Twitter about the situation as of 10 minutes ago. It seems that they are approx. 99.6% there.
