Twitter as a service has grown tremendously over the past several years and is now almost taken for granted as a platform that supports open communication across the world. It has been attributed a crucial role in grassroots protests, political movements and popular culture, and has attained a coveted status as an agenda setting medium for the global media. Imagine the world’s surprise, then, when Twitter said this week that it would censor tweets around the world. Or did it?

This week Twitter announced a new approach to content take down requests: “Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.”

The immediate response to this announcement was outrage – indeed today (January 28th) many users are protesting with a #BlackoutTwitter hashtag campaign. How could Twitter knuckle-under to dictators and over-zealous governments around the world, users asked? Imagine how ‘Arab Spring’ style popular movements will be stymied when the government tells Twitter to censor their tweets, or the persecution of political dissidents attempting to shine a light on corruption by repressive regimes! This sentiment was instant, forceful, and ultimately misguided. Let me explain.

Twitter already is required to censor tweets in response to government orders, or face the blocking of its entire service in that country. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York put it: “Twitter is not above the law.” It’s true, Twitter is not above the law, but this new policy is one of the most salient applications of John Gilmore’s famous statement: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

National governments have sovereignty within the territory of their nation, and are empowered to enact laws that are enforced therein. These laws can include restrictions on the freedom of speech – including some that may seem unusual or unnecessary to some (I’m thinking of bans on insulting the monarchy in Thailand or ‘objectionable content‘ laws in India). The internet operates beyond the confines any particular country – that is, a tweet that insults King Bhumibol Adulyadej is seen not only in Thailand but also in the United States or Argentina, where Thailand’s laws do not apply. That tension between the geographic limit of a nation’s sovereignty and the global reach of the Internet has long been a contested subject in the Internet’s development – I’ve written about it here.

What Twitter’s new policy is accomplishing is allowing the service to satisfy the laws of individual countries – such as Thailand in the example above – without applying that country’s limitations on free speech to users in other countries. It is a quite elegant solution and actually represents a reduction in censorship on Twitter, not an increase!

Beyond that, the transparency of Twitter’s solution – which was rightly lauded by Zeynep Tufekci (@TechSoc) as an “excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech activists” – actually serves to notify users in a particular country that content has been censored and removed from their view. This is quite an improvement from simply ‘disappearing’ an offending tweet from sight after being instructed by a government authority, and furthers the policy that Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray (@amac), has promoted with regards to informing users of secret subpoenas targeting them. Following Thursday’s announcement, users will now become more aware of any censorship that may take place in their country – and Twitter’s choice to share this information may even contribute to political reform in those countries. How’s that for knuckling under to dictators?

Twitter faces numerous challenges in bringing its service to an ever-growing global audience of users, not the least being managing different regulations on speech around the world. Twitter (and other social networking sites such as Facebook) can be quite destabilizing and even threatening to entrenched powers which are not used to dealing with the free exchange of information. But one thing that should not be condemned has been Twitter’s approach to supporting free speech, which has always been in favor of increased freedom of speech and more limited secrecy. I commend them for this latest announcement, and I believe that in the long run even those critics who were initially shocked and outraged by the notion of Twitter ‘censoring’ tweets, will come to realize the wisdom of the policy.

Twitter’s Promoted Products have been out in the market for some time, so now that the ad units are live how are they performing? Twitter claims that Promoted Products offer significantly greater levels of engagement than traditional online ad units, and present this as the justification for buying ads on Twitter versus search engines or Facebook.

I don’t doubt that these numbers are accurate, however it seems to me that counting total engagements is not necessarily the most relevant or helpful metrics. Consider Promoted Trends, Twitter’s very expensive ‘bullhorn’ advertising product. Today’s promoted trend, #QuittingSucks, was purchased by Nicorette in an effort to capitalize on New Year’s Resolutions to quit smoking. It’s actually a rather clever use of the Promoted Trend, but it is displayed to me (a non-smoker) the same as it is displayed to any other Twitter user.

Is this Promoted Trend relevant to me? I am a user of Twitter, yes, but I am not a potential customer of Nicorette’s products. Given the cost of 24 hours on Twitter’s Trending Topics list, is it a prudent use of Nicorette’s marketing budget to buy a Promoted Topic that displays the same message to all users regardless of its relevance?

This example demonstrates the larger problem with Promoted Trends – they are untargeted and result in advertisers paying to reach a global audience of users who may be uninterested in consuming the product. While the overall reach (and the related number of engagements) may be high, an advertiser should care most about reaching a relevant audience, rather than an absolutely large one. As of now, Promoted Trends are common across geography, language, gender, age and a host of other categories that one might traditionally market against. Instead of becoming tailored to particular users, however, they are a one-size-fits-all marketing message that is wasted on some substantial portion of the audience.

Twitter’s Trending Topics already can be narrowed down to regional areas, however Promoted Trends are common across all geographies. What would it take for Twitter to be able to serve Promoted Trends to particular regions instead of the entire world? What about serving Promoted Trends in Japanese only to users who tweet in Japanese? Once we start thinking about mining the interest graph to serve ads from a particular brand to users who have tweeted that brandname (or a competitor), then we are really getting the targeting juices flowing.

These kinds of changes could significantly improve the relevance of Promoted Trends, leading to a better experience for users as well as advertisers. Because of improved targeting, Twitter would also be able to sell more ads to more partners at the same time instead of just one for each 24-hour period. Promoted Trends have already come a long way, with brands showing a greater willingness to experiment with their trends and the way they use them to engage with users. Improved targeting could take the Promoted Products to the next level.

Today Facebook announced new elements of its location platform, including a Single Sign-On for mobile applications, the release of its Location APIs for third-party apps and the launch of a Deals Platform that already boasts an impressive number of major American brands. As MG Siegler put it in TechCrunch, The Other Location Shoe Has Dropped.

On the same day as the Facebook Places event, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley spoke about the future of Foursquare and what happens “After the Check-In” to the ad:tech conference in New York City. Based on a report of his comments in Mashable, Crowley seemed to be suggesting that the wealth of information contributed to Foursquare by users ought to improve the quality of the popular location-based service. “Every checkin should mean something,” Mashable reported Crowley as saying. “Foursquare should get smarter every time that you continue to check in.”

Clearly the use of location as a context for providing information to users is developing into an important service offering for information and communication technologies, including social networks like Facebook, location-based social networks like Foursquare and other web services such as Google and Twitter.

But after their announcements today, it appears that Facebook has ambitions to serve as the “central hub for all check-in apps,” as Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a thoughtful post on ReadWriteWeb. Kirkpatrick also laments the fact that both Foursquare and Facebook have pinned much of their hopes on monetizing location-sharing through coupons, special deals and targeted advertising (he said more about this subject in a Cinch podcast here).

I tend to agree with him on that point. Although deals and coupons are an obvious source of revenue in an emerging market that still needs to prove itself as a good investment, I wish that the ambitions for discovering how location as a context for information could really transform the way that people interact with and understand the physical space that surrounds them were greater than these commercial applications. In his post, Kirkpatrick points to the prototype of HP Gloe as an example of how an “ambient information service” could add value to people’s lives by providing them with further context about their environment (Disclosure: I worked with HP Labs on the positioning of HP Gloe).

Finally, I was prompted to write this post after reading a tweet from Techmeme editor Mahendra Palsule that tapped into a robust discussion begun today (by Robert Scoble, among others) of an inevitable clash between Facebook’s ambition with regards to location and those of another data-driven internet titan, Google. “Foursquare seems to be taking a Googlesque algorithmic approach to location, while FB focuses on its Social aspect” Palsule tweeted (he has since published a blog post expounding on this dichotomy and comparing Dennis Crowley’s comments today at ad:tech with previous statements by Google’s Schmidt).

Although this positions Google and Facebook as polar opposites, with Google representing the algorithm and Facebook the social aspect, I think that the reality (and also the place where we will likely find the more transformative ambient information services that Marshall discussed) is somewhere in-between. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has talked of adding a “social layer” to Google’s product offering, while Facebook has increasingly been broadening the reach of its own algorithms by opening up the social graph and making more user information public by default.

The question, at least with regards to the competition between Facebook and Google, may become whether the overall demands and expectations of users for location as a context are more socially motivated or more data driven.

For pretty much the length of Twitter’s existence, there have been people asking what its profit model will consist of. Until some months ago, Twitter seemed to be content to continue to build the service and grow its user base with the notion that focusing on improving the product and the user experience would lead to a successful business model in its own time.

At Chirp, Twitter’s first official developer conference, it finally become clear that Twitter was beginning to enclose the ecosystem in order to better capitalize on their increasingly popular service. First, Twitter board member Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about the Twitter platform which was remembered for his admonition to developers about ‘hole filling’: “I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone.” Next, Twitter purchased Atebits, the publisher of the iPhone application Tweetie. The (paid) product was re-released as a free app called Twitter for iPhone, and official Blackberry and Android apps soon followed. Twitter also recently changed its API Terms of Service to ban in-stream advertising by 3rd party apps and began testing its own link-shortening service, t.co (you can see it being tested in most Twitter employee’s streams). In a matter of a few weeks, Twitter made a number of announcements that pushed it inexorably towards becoming a revenue-generating business.

In addition to advertising, Twitter has set up deals with mobile network operators around the world to provide access to their subscribers and has licensed access to the full ‘firehose‘ of tweets to search engines and portals like Google, Bing and Yahoo, but much more attention has been paid recently to the new advertising products that Twitter has been testing over the past month. Currently there are three products:

Promoted Tweets: Promoted Tweets were announced at the AdAge Digital Conference in April, just days before Chirp (the announcement was further expounded in the New York Times). Essentially, advertisers can select one of their tweets and ‘promote’ it to be displayed on the top of search result pages for specified keywords. Keywords will eventually be bid on like Google Adwords, and are sold on a CPM basis. Participation is still limited to a small group of advertisers. The first Promoted Tweet was from Twitter, and among the first brands to try the ad units were Starbucks, Red Bull and Virgin America.

Promoted Trends: More recently Promoted Trends have been moving to the fore as Twitter’s most visible advertising product. Promoted Trends allow advertisers to buy a spot on the Trending Topics list which displays the most-popular topics being discussed at a given time. Promoted Trends are related to Promoted Tweets, because when a user clicks on the trend they are taken to a search result page for the trend, with a Promoted Tweet at the top of the page containing the advertising content. The first Promoted Trend was for Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, and it has been used in successful campaigns for Coca-Cola and Old Spice.

@earlybird: Finally, Twitter just this week launched @earlybird, a group buying product similar to recent eCommerce darling Groupon. Users follow the @earlybird account (it had almost 70,000 followers on 7/18) and receive notice of special limited deals and bargains. The first @earlybird deal was also with Disney, and provided a coupon code for 2-for-1 tickets to the fantasy film the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Now, how do these ad products work? When Promoted Tweets were first announced, Twitter COO Dick Costolo spent a lot of time talking about Resonance. Resonance is at the heart of Twitter’s advertising product’s value proposition, with the idea being that the ‘ads’ are in fact organic tweets that have been produced by the advertiser, and that their performance can be measured through users’ interaction with the Promoted Tweets. So, if a user retweets, replies to, favorites or clicks on a Promoted Tweet, those actions can be fed into a Resonance algorithm that determines how engaging the ad is. Promoted Tweets that do not sustain a sufficiently high Resonance score will cease to be displayed.

Going a bit deeper into Resonance, it is useful to look at another non-ad product that was rolled out a while ago: Top Tweets. Top Tweets were launched in late March, ahead of Chirp. Top Tweets are used to surface interesting tweets, and power the feed of tweets that populate the front page of twitter.com when you are not logged in. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand interviewed Twitter’s Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury about how the algorithm works: “The algorithm looks at all kinds of interactions with tweets including retweets, favorites, and more to identify the tweets with the highest velocity beyond expectations.”

Does this sound a bit like the description of the Resonance score for Promoted Tweets? Can you see how an algorithm such as this might be useful for benchmarking Promoted Tweet and Promoted Trend ad performance? And it’s not just Top Tweets and Promoted Tweets/Trends: the recent addition of name search into the integrated search at Twitter.com also factors the ‘popularity’ of the accounts into its decision of which users to display in relation to a search.

Clearly there is a dense set of algorithms working behind the scenes to judge tweet velocity, resonance and popularity, among other things. The rich set of data contained in the user object of each tweet provides a dizzying array of values for Twitter to use to slice, dice and target users on the network, and are likely to play a key role (along with the wildcard Annotations feature) in improving the targeting and personalization of Twitter advertising products.

So after spilling all of this digital ink, what have we learned? After years of facing questions about its profitability, Twitter has made a number of moves and released a number of products over the past few months that lay the groundwork for Twitter’s advertising business. First, Twitter has claimed the advertising ecosystem for itself through the API Terms of Service agreement, and then it has made efforts to standardize the user experience by providing official Twitter clients for popular mobile platforms like iPhone and Blackberry. The ad units that Twitter will sell consist of Promoted Tweets, whose performance will be dependent on their Resonance score. Resonance is measured (at least in part, I believe) by the same kinds of ‘popularity’ measures that power Top Tweets and user search algoritms, which include interactions such as retweets and replies.

In time, all of the links passed on Twitter will go through the t.co link wrapper, which will allow Twitter to measure click-through rates and referral statistics, helping to provide valuable analytics to advertisers to measure the performance of their campaigns. Promoted Trends allow advertisers to take advantage of real existing conversations surrounding their brand or related subjects and interpolate their own message into a prominent part of the discussion. Finally, as the ad products get more developed, they will be able to be served on a more discretionary basis to users based on a large number of relevance factors including location, language, platform, ‘popularity’, or any number of additional vectors that are included in the user object, or introduced by the deployment of Annotations.

When you add that all up, does this look like a compelling opportunity for organizations to reach their target audiences? Does the use of the Resonance score to ensure only highly-engaging Promoted Tweets are displayed herald an improved user experience when it comes to receiving commercial messages? Who will be the biggest beneficiaries of this model of advertising? Not all kinds of products or services generate the kind of buzz and engagement that Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends reward, but are there enough industries for whom it will be compelling? Judging from their adoption, Hollywood studios seem to like the model, but what about toilet paper?

These are the questions that will have to be answered after a longer period of experimentation and adjustment of the models. Still, provided your customers are users of Twitter, I think that the advertising model that Twitter is building is quite sophisticated and has the potential to be a great success. Time will tell if this turns out to be the case.

Nature has a way of reminding us how small we are. Although humanity has come a long way in taming Mother Earth and bending her to our will, there are still events that are beyond our ability to control. While our ability to stop heat waves and earthquakes from occurring has remained non-existent throughout history, our capacity for communication and sharing those affecting lived experiences with others has grown considerably over time.

A pair of natural events that have swept through certain affected communities of users over the past two days on the trendy social media services Foursquare and Twitter that brought to mind some thoughts about the value of shared lived experiences and suggested some strategies for developing man-made events that are similarly affecting.

First, a record heat wave has stricken America’s North-East, with the mercury surpassing 103 degrees in New York City on Tuesday. This uncomfortable weather condition has been keenly felt on NYC-based location-based service Foursquare, which has seen more than 4,500 users check-in to a ‘location’ that was created for the heat wave called Heatpocalypse. I don’t know who created the venue, but it has accumulated dozens of tips and tags over the past two days and prompted some of the increasingly more common Super Swarms (events where over 250 users have checked-in to the same venue in a given time period) that mark a large scale (for Foursquare, anyways) shared lived experience, whether that is a sporting event, a music festival or a political rally.

In the second event, a moderate earthquake rocked Southern California this evening towards the end of the work day, and many Twitter users (including its increasing celebrity population) immediately took to the status update service to spread the news of the tectonic event. Social media analytics service Rowfeeder posted that it had recorded over 60,000 relevant updates in the hours following the earthquake, and I tweeted shortly after the event that this kind of response has been commonly observed throughout Twitter’s history – I have even dug up an old post from a student discussion forum at the LSE on the subject back in 2007.

So what do these two events reveal about affecting lived experiences? It seems to suggest that when there are events of a large scope and specifically understood meaning that affects the lives of many, those who are affected have a tendency to share their experience through whatever means are available to them. The motivations for such sharing may vary across a number of factors, but what is common is that an impulse to share was elicited by the event. In my graduate research I tended to focus on the theory of identity performance as the motivation for sharing lived experiences through social media, however there are many other motivations to share information (including, for example, reassuring your friends and family that you haven’t died in a natural disaster).

Still, when it comes to trying to harness Super Swarms for your business or associating your brand with the immense outbursts of tweets related to a beloved international sporting event, I would suspect that mere mortals will find identity performance (users electing to associate themselves with a known cultural object) to be the most fruitful motivation for eliciting the impulsive response tendency of an affecting lived experience – that is, unless you’ve got an earthquake machine on your approved vendors list.

If anything has become clear to me in the past few weeks, it is that the issues and contradictions of identity and privacy online are coming to a head. With the process of virtualization having taken place over years and years, human society has now reached such a mass of users on the network that we are encountering disruptive externalities of the establishment of a network identity with increasing frequency.

While I have made my own personal position on Facebook’s recent issues clear, I think that their situation is in fact reflective of a larger issue than even that massive social network’s decisions. Hundreds of millions of people now experience some portion of their lives online, and they are beginning to come to grips with the relationship between their ‘real life’ identities and their network identity.This can take the form of any number of expected and unexpected consequences as a result of aspects of one of their identities becoming publicly accessible to the connections of another.

In many respects, it is the tension between the varying expectations of privacy of these two classes of identity that is causing the outcry that we have seen among some users of Facebook. Jeff Jarvis and danah boyd have both written compellingly about this, suggesting that there are numerous legitimate reasons why a person might have an expectation of being able to separate different aspects of their identity. Mark Zuckerberg’s contrasting position has been stated to be that the maintenance of a separation between different aspects of an individual’s identity suggests a lack of integrity.

Looming over this conversation (and supporting Zuckerberg’s stance, if not validating his opinion) is the technical reality that the capabilities of the network permit the centralized aggregation of multiple identities. One of the strongest sentiments that I have seen reacting against complaints of Facebook’s changes is that users should never publish anything on the internet that they wouldn’t want to be made public. We have known for years that privacy is something of an illusion on the internet, and with the rise of big data analysis, even the notion of ‘privacy through obscurity’ is becoming quaint.

So where does this leave us? It seems to me that we can clearly see that there is a disconnect between users’ expectations of their privacy online, and the reality. There is also some degree of ignorance or misunderstanding about the costs and benefits of living publicly and sharing information with a wide range of entities. What I think needs to happen is a public, wide-ranging discussion of privacy and identity online that both allows users to understand the exchange that they engage in when they trade personal information for access to systems online, and also reaches an agreement on what an ethical model of user data collection and sharing would look like (perhaps something similar to the informed consent required for most medical and social sciences research). Following such a discussion, a society could then more formally negotiate rules and regulations that govern this crucial development in social conditions.

Without any such discussion, I believe that we are doomed to repeat this disruption of the clash of identities that is empowered by the network society.

It’s time that I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I’ve told many friends, and will announce soon on my Facebook profile, that I will be queuing my account for deletion by the end of the weekend. I expect that some people might wonder why I would do such a thing, and so this blog post is intended to explain my motivations.

As I recall, I joined Facebook sometime in late 2004 or perhaps early 2005. I had known about the site before, but it was open only to students at certain universities at that time. I submitted a request for my school to be added to the list of supported universities, and joined as soon as I was alerted by email that it had been. At about that time, Facebook had this privacy policy, according to archive.org: “No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.” A post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this visual infographic, demonstrate how that privacy policy has changed over time to one that is fundamentally more public by default. The most recent changes, announced late last year and then expanded at the Facebook developer conference f8 last month, have pushed me over the edge.

With these changes, Facebook created a new quality of information known as Publicly Available Information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friends list and pages. If you want to see what information of yours is now publicly available through the Open Graph Protocol, try using this nifty website. Compounding the problem, Facebook has now transformed your profile page to restructure it around your ‘Connections’, which primarily consist of Pages that you’ve ‘Liked’. As we just noted, Pages are publicly available information, so effectively the majority of your page is now made up of publicly available information.

Although I am quite concerned with the issue of identity and privacy online (and have written about it here before), I do in fact share quite a lot of information publicly on the web. I have a public Twitter feed, I share papers that I have written on Scribd and presentations that I’ve delivered on SlideShare. I maintain a LinkedIn account that I use for professional networking, answer anonymous questions posed to me on Formspring.me and share pictures on Twitpic. And, as I explained at the top of this post, I have been on Facebook for years to connect with my personal friends.

Of all of these tools that I use to share information that I find interesting, relevant or otherwise worthy of attaching to my identity and publishing to a group of self-selecting listeners (aka my friends, followers and contacts) only Facebook has frequently and unilaterally altered the understanding of privacy that I am granted by their service. Their behavior in this regard is unpredictable and inconvenient, as it requires me to stay abreast of the latest alteration to their privacy policy, and adjust each new addition to the privacy settings once I discover it.

There has been a lot of vitriol and emotional outrage among some in reaction to Facebook’s recent changes. I don’t want to make my decision a part of that. It’s not a matter of opt-in vs. opt-out, or the appropriate role of social graph data-mining in powering targeted advertising to support a free web service. For me, the question is whether or not I trust Facebook with the privilege of serving as the broker of my identity online. In light of recent decisions taken by Facebook, and based on my own expectation of where I see this path leading for Facebook’s decisions in the future, I have decided that I no longer trust Facebook with that privilege.

I will be queuing my profile for deletion by the end of this weekend. If you decide that you no longer trust Facebook with the privilege of serving as the mediator of your identity online, click here to reach the page where you can request the deletion of your account.

If you are a friend of mine on Facebook and want to remain in touch, look for me here at this website, or at one of the other social media sites that I listed above, or call/email me with the contact info you’ve already got – it hasn’t changed.

Recent news regarding the release of a video by the website Wikileaks has led to an inspection of the legal and national status of sites like Wikileaks – and indeed have called into question the whole nature of national identity and sovereignty. This New York Times article makes several interesting observations that can lead to further discussion.

The article spends considerable time discussing the legal questions surrounding Wikileaks and how it can host the content that it does:

“WikiLeaks publishes its material on its own site, which is housed on a few dozen servers around the globe, including places like Sweden, Belgium and the United States that the organization considers friendly to journalists and document leakers.”

Because the material (data in this case) is hosted in multiple different countries – each with their own laws on privacy and freedom of speech – Wikileaks can serve its content to users across the global internet without being subject to laws of some nation that might prohibit the possession of such material. Essentially, the law remains stubbornly fettered by national boundaries, while the internet vaults (relatively) freely across borders and cultures. Wikileaks exploits this asymmetry (and others) to find an effective means of distributing information that previously had been controlled by ruling powers.

We have seen this asymmetry before in a number of areas. Military’s around the globe have complained about Google Earth opening up access to satellite imagery that at one time was the top-secret preserve of elite American and Soviet commanders. Now anybody with an internet connection can access satellite or aerial photographs of numerous sensitive military bases and research facilities. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled (including by me) about the empowering nature of information and communications technologies in Iran during the post-election period of 2009 that permitted individual citizens armed with nothing more than mobile phones to distribute information that the Iranian state actively sought to suppress. And the question of enforcing intellectual property rights has always been good for bombastic acts such as the Pirate Bay’s doomed effort to purchase the micro-(non)nation of Sealand and establish a state free of the legal jurisdiction of copyright.

Wikileaks represents another example of the challenge that a globally distributed network like the world wide web poses to the sovereignty and supremacy of the nation-state. The state has become more aware of this threat of late – the debate surrounding the newly enacted Digital Economy Bill in the UK demonstrates only the most recent example of a government attempting to get a tighter grip on the internet – but it is also increasingly seeing deterritorialized web entities position themselves as legitimate adversaries to state power (witness Google vs. China).

As access to the network extends to more and more people, and as our society and economy become more and more reliant upon the remote access to information and computing resources on the network, these issues will only be thrown in further relief.

—

This is already a long blog post, but I want to share an essay I wrote for a course taught by Manuel Castells last year at the conclusion of my graduate studies. It analyzes this issue in greater depth and situates it within the context of the origins of the internet, and the decisions that were made then regarding network standards and procedures.

Don’t Worry, We’re From the Internets!

Twitter has always paid attention to its most popular users, as defined by the number of followers who subscribe to their tweets. That number can be a useful metric because it provides some suggestion of the amount of people who might receive a given message. The higher the number, this thinking goes, the more people are likely to receive the message, and the more influential the user who sends the message. With more than 200 Twitter users boasting over 1,000,000 followers according to Twitterholic, the potential reach of Twitter is considerable indeed.

Most of these Twitter Millionaire users are “real world” celebrities or public figures that have existing notoriety supported by more traditional forms of awareness-building in the mainstream press. However given that there are these Twitter users whose audience is so large, how can we observe their influence manifested on a communication network like Twitter? Comedian Conan O’Brien has offered us a glimpse of this virtual influence in action.

A few weeks ago Conan O’Brien joined Twitter after the loss of his late night television program. He’s quickly gathered over half a million followers with his relatively spare tweets (only 11 tweets since 2/24/2010). In addition to publishing few tweets, Conan had not followed any other user on Twitter. Had not, that is, until yesterday when he announced that he was adding a user “at random.”

When I learned of this action, I decided to undergo a brief observation of the growth in that user’s followers as a consequence of Conan’s follow. As Sarah Killen, the user named @LovelyButton that Conan followed, has herself stated she had 3 followers at the time Conan selected her. This article in TechCrunch yesterday afternoon notes that her followers had jumped to 1,300 in the time since Conan followed her. The article includes an update that, in the “few minutes” that transpired between the writing and publishing of the blog post, her followers had doubled to 2,600. By the time that I first took a sample of @LovelyButton’s followers, she had gained 8,755 followers in eight hours. As of the posting of this blog, @LovelyButton’s follower growth has slowed somewhat, but has reached 13,252 in a little more than 24 hours. This figure represents somewhat more than 2% of his total following. Not too shabby for reflected attention!

Apart from adding new followers, @LovelyButton has also generated a lot of conversation online. Beyond the mainstream coverage online in the Los Angeles Times, MTV, EW.com and the Huffington Post – all big deal media hits, btw – Sarah has been the talk of many users on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I created a search profile in Radian6 to collect a large number of tweets mentioning @LovelyButton, and it has 2,931 mentions (instances of the term ‘@lovelybutton’) to date. On the public Facebook status update search there are also hundreds of mentions of ‘Sarah Killen’, as well as a fan page with 150 members.

So what’s the point of all of this? It looks like @LovelyButton’s follower growth may have peaked already (see this graph of mentions), and is not likely to have a major resurgence without additional support from Conan (he tweeted about her again today) or her media appearances. Still, I believe that this event provides a valuable case study for understanding the impact of the network effect on virtual influence. Through the strength of his relationship with his audience, Conan was able to compel over 10,000 of them to take a discrete action: to follow @LovelyButton simply because he chose her.

And beyond Conan’s role in identifying her, we can also observe here the way in which the virtual audience achieves a level of agency in their choice to participate in and experience the event of @LovelyButton’s selection. In the same way that Facebook users will choose a pickle over a rock band, 4chan users will spoil a news magazine’s reader poll, Slashdot readers will crash an under-prepared server with visits and YouTube viewers will love a video of Susan Boyle singing, what Conan’s choice of Sarah as a tabula rasa for his followers to project themselves onto is indicative of is what influence and attention have become in the virtual world of friends, followers, page views and links.

I told you that it wasn’t just a one-off!

Today’s Twitter List Index features a few changes, I hope that I can call them improvements. Check below for details.
Twitter List Index Nov 3

All of the URLs were cluttering the page, so I’ve removed them and simply hyperlinked the list names. I decided that the related links were extraneous to the purpose of the index, and anyways are easily discovered.

I’ve added a few columns in place of the links. Follow cat. is intended to provide a sense of how highly-followed the list creator’s account is. Category 5 list creators have more than one million followers. Category 4 is more than 100,000 followers, category 3 10,000 followers, category 2 more than 1,000 followers and category 1 has fewer than 1,000 followers. I’ll have a post coming up on why it might be valuable to compare list followings with the list creator’s following.

The lists column denotes how many lists the creating user account is included on. I collect this number daily, but of course it can potentially change substantially in a matter of minutes or hours. Some people have suggested that being included on many lists may be more beneficial to an individual’s social capital than being highly followed. I don’t know what I think about that, but I’ve added the metric for purposes of comparison.

Finally, each entry in the list is color coded to denote any changes in rank since the previous day’s list index. Green indicates a rise in rank, red a demotion, and gray indicates no change in rank. I considered adding more details about the percentage change, or how many ranks up/down a list has moved. Perhaps I will include those in further editions.

I definitely welcome any feedback from readers out there. You can leave comments on the blog, or find me on Twitter as @hornOKplease.