socialmedian: On Twitter, Followers Aren’t Really Friends

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On Twitter, Followers Aren’t Really Friends

Source: GigaOM

Dec 29, 2008

Summary

This past weekend, we had yet another tempest in a teapot here in the blogosphere, this time over what, exactly, determines the authority of a tweet on Twitter. Some argued that the number of followers is the best yardstick with which to measure how important a tweet was, while others argued that it is who you follow that’s more valuable.

The high drama made me wonder: Why can’t a tweet just be a tweet? Why does it have to be about authority? (I assume authority means “power to influence or command thought, opinion or behavior.“) Nevertheless the discussion reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Bernardo Huberman, director of HP’s Social Computing Lab. He (along with Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu) recently collected and analyzed information from the Twitter network to find out which people truly matter in an individual’s social graph – and what ultimately influences a person’s ability to absorb content.

For each user of Twitter in our data set we obtained the number of followers and followees (people followed by a user) the user has declared, along wi

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