PS: One other dynamic I've self-observed: The more followers I have, the more I get. While this might seem like Merton/Matthew 101: those who have, get more I had expected the opposite: a ceiling effect on the truly modest grounds that I can't be That Interesting to That Many people. Rather, it appears to be a snowball effect. People who see some of my tweets on a Peep they are following decide to follow me. Worth modeling with multiple starting points for the sample. Happy Canada Day! Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________ On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Barry Wellman wrote:
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:38:18 -0400 From: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> To: Bernie Hogan <bernie.hogan@gmail.com>, aoir list <air-l@aoir.org> Cc: barry wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Subject: Who to UnFollow
Bernie/Blurky,
Thanks for your thoughtful post re twitter.
I have often stopped following things such as what you ate for dinner. One famous guy who did this a lot got mad at me about my not reciprocally following him. I explained why politely, and never heard from him again. I assume he's still mad. My first experience with Twitter Politics.
I try to keep almost all of my tweets to my ideas or RTweeting others -- lotsa pointers to longer discussions.
However, every once in a while I am bursting that was important to me that I just have to share it -- such as Bev/my recent Rafting down the Grand Canyon or you (Blurky/Bernie) coming to town.
I also use such Tweets (as NancyBaym does) to promote my friends'/students' work.
One thing hard to solve is people I usually learn from but who also point their daily stuff ("in the garden, painting my shoes"). I've half-seriously thought we could have Tweet1 and Tweet2 for ideas vs self-reporting posts.
I'm also mystified why so many people (500+) follow me. I don't think I give very good value. (One of the first things we learned in the early days of computerized conferencing is that people have less useful things to say to each other on a daily basis than when they save it up for annual conferences.) Some do follow because others have suggested. Others I think are collectors of "names", even though no one would accuse me of being Ashton Kushner. I know in a few cases I myself am following a famous social scientist because he is famous (and verbose).
There seem to be disciplinary clusters (when George Siemens of e-learning suggested following me, there was a surge) and geographical clusters (in my case: Brasil and Australia) which I assume is word of mouth. I can't believe that people who are following 500 have time to read them, even if they use Tweetdeck to prioritize. I have barely time to skim the 100 I do follow. As I tweeted yesterday, "frittering my time away" has been replaced by "twittering my time away".
There are a whole bunch of research projects here, plus the social network stuff on who follows whom. Certainly I'm cross-linked with a bunch of AoIRish people. I know this because when someone Follows me, I check out who else they're following.
Happy Canada Day!
Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________
S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________