bijan:
There is no doubt that I enjoy following celebrities on Twitter. If you hit my twitter profile @bijan you will see that I’m following a mix of celebs in business, sports and music.
It’s awesome to hear their unfiltered thoughts and when you get an @reply from them it’s quite cool.
But this post isn’t about celebs.
It’s about meritocracy inside of our social networks.
My favorite part about being part of a community on twitter, tumblr, boxee, gdgt, stack exchange, is following and interacting with the a new type of “celeb” - those that are born on and inside those networks. There are folks that earn and create their status and reputation by their actions inside the community.
For example I’m more excited about listening to a new song that david noel (@david) shares in tumblr vs something on pitchfork or Rolling Stone. I trust david. He has earned that trust with me and plenty of others by the quality of his content, passion and spirit.
Same is true with gadgets. david pogue on the NYT is less important to me than marco’s reviews on tumblr. Marco created his trusted status with me and plenty of others inside of the network he helped build.
We have a meritocracy inside of our social networks. And I’m very grateful about that.
(please excuse typos and lack of links. Wrote this on my iPhone)
The sort of following that celebrities gather does not reflect real influence: as Bijan suggests, they haven’t earned that through merit. So, discounting the Kardashians and Kutchners of the world, we are left with authorities of one stripe or another. Those with derived authority, a writer for the NY Times, for example, may deserve less regard than an avid individual developer, like Marco Arment.
In the future, ‘search for the best’ will be replaced by meaning: your social network will tell you what it thinks you’d like to see. We will still rely on machinery to perform ‘navigational search’: when I know what I am looking for, like a specific article, website, restaurant, or book, but I con’t recall or don’t know the URL.
Instead of a geographically helpful but totally unsocial search for a Thai restaurant on Google maps, I might instead visit a service like Dinevore, and find some Thai restaurants my friends like.
This is why Google is threatened by being so socially tone deaf. This is what they should be using my list of contacts for, not Buzz or chat.
