Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise
CATHY BROOKS is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict. Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter’s social use case has been developing alongside its operational strains: a 2007 account of friends trading updates and frustrations preceded recurring downtime, a three-day outage, and an incident in which private direct messages appeared in public streams. Against that backdrop, the service’s value lies less in the raw flow of short updates than in which people users choose to follow.
The article’s focus on Cathy Brooks’s heavy posting and sharing activity captures an early answer to information overload: personal connections can act as a filter. That matters for Twitter as it seeks to explain its usefulness to businesses while users also report suspected spam followers.
First-order effects
- Twitter users have a clearer reason to maintain selective follow lists: friends’ updates can surface useful material from an otherwise high-volume stream.
- Twitter’s product proposition shifts toward trusted social discovery, while spam accounts and public exposure of direct messages directly weaken the credibility of those connections.
Second-order effects
- Businesses considering Twitter must earn attention through relationships and useful updates rather than rely on the service’s overall conversation volume.
- Twitter’s engineering and operations team faces pressure to improve reliability and account quality, because interruptions and fraudulent followers make social filtering less dependable.
Third-order effects
- If personal networks become the primary way people navigate continuous updates, social services will compete on the quality and trustworthiness of their connection graphs rather than on publishing volume alone.
The trend: Social media is becoming an information-discovery layer in which trusted personal connections filter an expanding stream of updates.