Metrics that miss the point

One of the key differences between Twitter and Facebook seems to be the nature of the ecosystem that's grown up around each. Facebook seems to favor a big-tent kind of mentality--providing, of course, that they sell you the canvas. Twitter's much looser: They own the campground, metaphorically speaking, but don't seem to impose too many other restrictions as long as you're not waking people with tribal drumming and howling at the moon at two in the morning.

Different folks will of course find differing value in each ethos, of course. But they are, mostly, mutually exclusive. Say what you will about dialectic and synthesis, but I strongly feel that applying the rules of one to the mechanisms of the other is foolhardy.

Tonight @JakeWobegon tweeted about running afoul of a Twitter account that, for all practical purposes, has hired a doorman--and a snooty one at that. It's called TrueTwit. (Aside: I'd like to take this moment to congratulate the person who dreamed up the name b/c sixty-one million Brits--not to mention those of us who grew up on PBS BBC rebroadcasts--are now snickering up their/our sleeves at you. Good job.) But anyhoo...the basic idea behind the service is to "validate" those who would follow your tweets to make sure they don't associate with "the wrong crowd," as Mummy would say over tea and crumpets.

Yes, yes, I know: Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas and All That, but it's Twitter, for pete's sake! Anyone who knows half of anything about the way it works is aware of two salient facts:

1. Peeps don't monitor followers in real real-time (and block the spammers and other unsavory types).
2. Peeps who obsess about the quality of their followers never mentally graduated from middle school and shouldn't be followed anyway.
   

More to the point, it's not like their spam/porn shows up in your tweetstream until you follow them. Yeah, you get a sample when you block them, and that can make you want to boil your screen--I get it. But for anyone who pines for a more...ah curated...browsing experience, may I suggest building a time machine and porting yourself back to AOL circa 1996? I really think you'll be happier that way.

That's not to say that I don't actively block the obvious spammers, porn-bots or those whose (ahem!) "agendas" are diametrically opposed to my weltanshauung. But that's something I take responsibility for doing. The ones fishing for knee-jerk follow-backs normally take care of themselves. But everyone else--so far as I'm concerned, anyway--is doing me a favor.

But as much as I seem to be tilting at a strawman here, my main--and much larger--point is that "followers" can easily become valued followees, and no algorithmic metric can compete with spending a little time profile-surfing and coming to a rational judgement--sometimes only even a gut feeling before making the keep/block call. That, and if you're to important to "groom" your Twitter entourage yourself, you should probably hire a real person to do it for you.