Twitter is a numbers game. No matter how much we want to stress the importance of their real time communication, Twitter is really a numbers game. Everyone is obsessed about getting a high number of followers. More followers means more “influence” your real time tweets have. Not only are people obsessed with the high number of people following them, but they want to follow a low number of people themselves. This Following/Follower ratio is very important to people. The greater discrepancy between your Following/Followers gives the perception that you’re someone important and worth following. So if everyone wants to be followed and few want to follow, what kind of mess does this bring us?
Hypothetically any message you send out on Twitter can be seen by anyone. The reality is that there is a small percentage of people who actually read your tweets, most of the time you’re just another person on their follower list. If your list begins to swell (mine is just over 1,000) then it becomes difficult to read many of your tweets (there are 3rd party apps and twitter lists to help this,
but that’s another topic).
This obsession over numbers could ultimately kill Twitter. Twitter’s network itself won’t be it’s legacy for decades upon decades. It will be their introduction of real time information to the world. That is a concept that is just being rolled out at a mass scale and that’s what we will all get out of this Twitter craze.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the social network Ning has reached it’s full potential. It’s been around for a while, but I think it’s going to grow within the next few years. I really do.
