Loic finds out that words matter.
He asks for a simple -- perhaps -- feature, saying that he'd like to be able to filter (or sort) search results in Twitter based on the number of followers that they tweet authors have. Seems fairly innocuous, right?
But he used the term 'authority' as being synonymous with 'number of followers.' Oops.
My sense is that Loic was thinking about this feature in a very industrial strength manner: as a conference organizer -- LeWeb -- he want to be able to attend to Twitter posts in some order other than a/ random, b/ time sequence, or c/ keyword. His approximation of 'number of followers' with 'authority' has some merit, since a/ Twitter provides the number of followers without any coaxing or algorithmic mumbo jumbo, and b/ there have been sixteen dozen applications that rely on 'number of followers' as the only or the primary means of ordering the Twitterati based on their presumed level of influence on the Twittersphere as a whole, and the greater Web by extension.
A howling was heard across the land, led by Scoble, who comes out swinging:
[from Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search]You’d think I’d be all over that idea, right? After all I have a lot more followers than Loic or Arrington has.
But you’d be wrong. Ranking by # of followers is a stupid idea. Dave Winer agrees. Mike Arrington, on the other hand, plays the wrong side of the field by backing Loic’s dumb idea.
Here’s why it’s a stupid idea: everyone is gaming the number of followers. And, even if everyone weren’t, popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not.
It would increase noise, not decrease it. After all, if such a system were in effect you’d see my Tweets at the top of the page, even for things that I don’t have any business being at the top of the page for.
For instance, let’s say we were talking about something in China. How about something affecting supply chain management. Who should be at the top of such a result? @liamcasey because he runs a sizeable supply chain management company in China. But, no, he won’t be at top if Loic gets his way. I would be. That’s really lame.
Um, sorry Robert. It is not 'lame' -- it is a tautology. A search that ranks tweets by the author's number of followers would place you ahead of Liam Casey because, you guessed it, you have more followers.
And Robert's assertions about secondary and tertiary metadata casting better light on 'authority' in the Twittersphere are unconvincing, because the laws of large numbers are such that the numbers of retweets and 'favoriting' are closely allied to the overall number of followers. Robert is trying to get at something, though, although I don't think he formulates it very well: 'authority' relative to a topic -- being knowledgeable about chess, the Napoleonic Wars, or nuclear physics -- is not the same as celebrity. (Note that in this discussion many people conflate celebrity with popularity, just like others conflate authority with 'number of followers'.)
While that is true, the reason why Scoble and a bunch of others get so angry about this discussion is complex. Here's Sarah Lacey chiming in (after a meandering recitation of her personal life journey), saying that this confusion between celebrity and authority has been cross-wired forever: it's nothing new, and people game the various systems out there -- like Techmeme and Twitter -- to drive more traffic and derive tangible (ka-ching!!) benefits from that.
[from SarahLacy.com: We've Been in Idiot Land a While Now, Scoble. Get Comfortable.]Don't worry, Scoble, a fight over Twitter search features may drive more traffic today, but in the long term good reporting and following your own intellectual curiosity always win out.
Winer cites Jeremiah Owyang's recent suggestion: He'd rather have priority in filtering applied to people he follows. This concept has been around a while, and is another good ranking approach for different circumstances or purposes.
If I am interested in who has been promoting the new #firstfollow meme, I might want to rank results based on celebrity, since that sort of notion is likely to be linked to 'number of followers' sort of celebrity. Below, I am displaying the results of a search from the newly created Twitority, which has been hacked in the past few days as the direct result of Loic's request. You see that I am currently the highest 'authoritied' Twitterer who has used the '#firstfollow' hashtag, meaning who was the first person you followed on Twitter.
However, the discussion about topical or subject matter authority is a whole different beast, in principle. Who is to say if I am the most knowledgeable person about Twitter search? Perhaps Greg Narain (@gregarious in the image) might be objectively judged by a jury of social software experts as more knowledgeable than me. Or some other sort of algorithmic tool might emulate a panel of experts in some way, like counting keywords that he and I have used in our Twitter streams, or assigning us 'swarmth' (a measure of swarm-based authority) based on those who are following us and the keywords that we use in our Twitter conversations. Or we could institute a tagging model for Twitter, where other users could tag us, in essence stating that certain terms define us. If I had 500 people tag me with 'social tools' and Greg only had 250, I might be considered more of an authority than him for that specific topic.
All of these techniques have some sort of merit, potentially, and all of them suffer from the same weakness: once such techniques are employed in a way that approximates authority, they will be manipulated by people seeking to appear to have authority in general, or in specific.
Here I am, writing a post about authority, celebrity, Twitter, search, and their interaction and impact on the web in general. I am seeking to shape opinion. I am trying -- directly or indirectly -- to convince others that a/ I know what I am talking about, and b/ that they should reshape their views based on my thoughts, and c/ they should pass those reformulated opinions along to others, d/ hopefully mentioning my name.
That is not evil. It is at the core of human cognition, social interaction, and how communities -- of all scales -- work.
So where did this come to be an argument about what is or isn't 'good'? ('Good' in quotes means that it has something to do with ethics, not utility.)
In a nutshell: there is a misperception that since the Web is a 'democratizing' force -- a forum for open social discourse in which we all can participate without regard to our status or wealth -- then the Web must be 'democratic' in the overly simplistic going-to-the-polls metaphor of one-person-one-vote.
The fact is that human brains don't really work that way, human societies don't work that way, and -- surprise! -- the (pre-Twitter) Web doesn't work that way. Twitter doesn't work that way, either.
People who are prominent by virtue of one set of characteristics -- who achieve renown and social capital because they are successful in one area of endeavor -- have a greater influence on others opinions, even outside of their area of greatest competence. This is why charities seek celebrity spokespersons, and why Oprah's endorsement of Obama mattered.
So, what we know about society and social interaction tells us that celebrity leads to great influence. People can achieve celebrity for all manner of things: athletic prowess, business success, artistic abilities, or just being in the right place at the right time.
We could dream up a gazillion possible dials on a Twitter search dashboard, but relatively quickly we would find that only a few would be generally used. Yes, I would often like to know what my closest friends (= people I am following who are also following me = inner circle) are nattering on about. Yes, I would like to know what people that I am following, my influencers (= people I follow that do not follow me) are nattering about. I might also like to find out what people that I remotely influence (= people that follow me that I don't follow back) are nattering on about. And I might like to know what the whole wide world is nattering on about ranked on celebrity, or topical authority, or tagged authority, or any other scheme that taps the Twittersphere's ability to echolocate on who are the authorities out there.
Patrick O'Brian once had one of his characters ask, rhetorically, "Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?" He suggested that given proximity and time, our characters and characteristics become evident to those we are in contact with. Those that are wise, caring, gifted, or full of grace are likely to gain our regard, and to influence us in many ways.
We shouldn't spend too much time trying to split this hair: people want to be influenced, we are constructed to be connected. Yes, people can try to game this, as they always have. But it doesn't mean that being influential -- or even wanting to, or striving to -- is inherently bad. We don't have to level everything for all of us to matter: it's enough that we keep the social space open, and rely on our core social instincts.
Loic fell afoul of one of the myths of modern open discourse: that democratic principles mean we all have the same impact, or importance, in social settings. No: it means we have -- or should have -- the same opportunity to become influential, to make an impact on the world, to make a difference to more than those who know us personally.
This does not extol celebrity for its own sake, but at the same time, I am stating that it is OK to want to make a big difference, and to use the tools available to do so.
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