Twitter Hierarchy

For most of the last year, I’ve been working behind a corporate firewall which blocks most social networking sites. It’s therefore only in the last month or so that I’ve been able to use Twitter all day every day.

It seems to me that many of Twitter’s users have slightly distorted the sites original purpose. It was originally intended to be used for posting brief “I’m doing this” messages, But many people seem to be using it to hold conversations with their friends. It’s become a sort of “non-instant messaging”. Interestingly, the site’s developers noticed this change and added features (like replies) which made it easier to use the site in this way.

But there are still places where the site’s origins are obvious. On anyone’s profile page you can see two numbers listing the number of people that person is following and the number of people who follow that person. But actually the Twitterverse doesn’t break down into two sets like that. There is a more interesting set of three numbers. For most people their sets of followers and followees aren’t disjoint sets. There is another set of people who both follow you and are being followed by you. Let’s call them your peers.

So we have three sets of people. The people who you follow but who don’t follow you in return (people you think are interesting but who don’t think you are interesting enough to follow), your peers and the people who follow you but who you don’t follow in return (people who think you are interesting but who you don’t think are interesting enough to follow). There’s probably a whole cyber-sociology paper in analysing the ratios between the sizes of those three groups for different types of people.

But the important thing is that you can only carry on a conversation with people in your peer group. It remind me of the old Frost Report sketch about class differences. The people higher than you in the food chain don’t listen to what you say. A few times I’ve missed things that people said to me because I’m not following them and simply adding “@davorg” to your message doesn’t add it to my home page (think of the spam potential if it did).

I get round this by using Twitter Search (previously Summize) to search for messages to me. Actually I go a step further than that and have a feed from that query in Bloglines. Is that a common solution to the problem? What do other people do? Is it a problem that you’ve noticed?

Another, related, issue is how do you move up the hierarchy? Is there an etiquette for contacting people who you follow but who don’t follow you? Can you just send them a direct message saying “hey I’m interesting, follow me”? And is anyone being inclusive and automatically following anyone who follows them?

Oh and what does Twitter have that Pownce, Jaiku or identi.ca don’t have? Is it just the number of users? Will we ever see a big move from Twitter to identi.ca like the MySpace to Facebook move of last year?

Update: hanakomu points out (on twitter of course) that if someone replies to you then the message appears in your ‘replies’ tag whether or not you’re following to them. Also, people get a mail when you follow them – but I think that’s probably optional.