So with all this talk on Twitter's business model (Gordon, Meg) I noticed something a bit different about Twitter. That people seemed to know the people they friended.
This was more in keeping with what Twitter represented than the MySpace/YouTube vibe of people having a bazilion friends. (Even Flickr has this problem to some degree). I call this "The attention seeking dickhead factor"
Then I got a friended by Springnet (7107 Friends, 1285 Followers).
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the number connections an average person can make. It works out to about 150-200 for the average person.
So I have no idea what My Springnet is doing. You can't follow 7000 people. It's just not possible. What I suspect he is doing is getting attention for his blogs and venture's by friending everyone he can. I have no idea who he is, and he has no idea who I am. If a random added me as a friend but had a normal amount of people on their friend list I would imagine that they had found me via my blog or what not.
Springnet I suspect is just adding everyone. This seems to be me to be a bit like spam in a way. I dunno what you call adding connections of friends spam. Friendspam? I think I'll go with ASDFing (attention seeking dickhead factor-spaming)
[Update]: You know I just realised ASDF where the first 4 letters on the keyboard. I mean I know that, but I didn't come up with the term intentionally because of that. I just realised now when reading the blog and wondering why ASDF looked so familiar.
1. Matt
You forgot to add in the last </em> there. Hence your entire page being in italics.
Oh, and yeah, agreed. I have added people who I know, whose blogs I read, or who I have contacted in some way about something. Anything more than that is just ASDF-ing, as you say.
Oh, and I got friended by springnet too. What a twat.
2. Adrian
Fixed.
3. razorhead
Didn’t know that about Goretex - interesting.
I don’t need twitter, I already have a ‘what am I doing right now’ tool. He calls himself a ‘manager’. And he is a tool.
4. razorhead
Thinking about goretex again, doesn’t that mean that the only people the company expects you to know are your cow-orkers?
5. Gordon
razor - read Tipping Point (then Make it Stick, then Blink). All ace.
I’ve been “friended” by a few people in Twitter recently, all of whom fit that profile. I really REALLY don’t see the point… unless..
Are they then scraping the content, or yanking out via API to create a constant “feed” of content for some nefarious reason??
Or can I just hunt them down and spork them to death. Asshats.
6. Adrian
I think you have different levels or connection Razor. So you probably don’t know everyone at Goretext, but you know of most people. You probably find their are layers of ‘knowing’.
You might find your connections are better with a factory size of 100, but 100 might be to small to manufacture stuff, and the breakdown in connection quality at 200 is small but at 250 is quite big.
I think Goretext just found that a number of 150-200 worked and a number above that broke down.