I’m going to take some criticism for this, but I think it’s something that needs to be said: We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed.
FriendFeed and Twitter are different than normal social networks because they don’t require two people to mutually agree to become friends. Instead, you simply choose to follow someone and see the content they produce. That person is notified that you are following them, and can choose to reciprocate or not.
So far, so good. The idea is that you shouldn’t be pressured into following/subscribing to another person just so that they can read your content. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.
And for the most part it works. But there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice – deal with the fallout (“that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.
Here’s the problem, though. When you follow too many people the service just becomes unusable. On Twitter I follow just 466 people that I find interesting, but the content stream is far too much to consume. On Friendfeed the problem is even worse because it aggregates so much other content (Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, blogs, etc.).
On Twitter I generally only monitor messages specifically directed at me (@techcrunch must be in the message), and I sort of peruse Friendfeed a few times a day to find interesting stuff. But what I really want to do is have a core group of friends that I watch.
That means Twitter and FriendFeed need to let me group friends somehow and let me watch just some of them if I like. Or a simpler approach: give me a Fake Follow.
The Fake Follow looks like a normal follow to the other person, but to me it’s like I didn’t follow them at all. This solves the ego stroking issue (and related problems) that so many people have, and it keeps the content stream clean and usable.
Eventually we’ll evolve online culture to the point where people adapt to these new systems (just like today people aren’t usually offended when an instant message isn’t returned, well, instantly). But until then we need to find a way to keep things under control, and anger at a minimum. And since Twitter and FriendFeed will become far more usable with it, it’s in their best interests to adopt it.
I asked Evan Williams at Twitter about this a few weeks ago and he said they may adopt different friend types to deal with the problem. FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit says they are releasing new features in the coming weeks that will “make it easier to separate the people who you really want to follow from the rest.” They may not call it a Fake Follow, but we’ll all nod and wink when the features roll out. Thanks in advance, Paul.
Hi Mike,
Brilliant thought and very practical. I think it all is coming from the fact that Social Networks are somewhat losing what humans are all about in their real lives.
We need something that is basically an extension of our actual lives. Maybe the day that something comes, it will be a huge hit
Akshay
Michael, what applies to you is not “friendship”, it’s fanatism or let’s call them groupies. At this point, twitter is nothing more than some sort of “centralized” RSS for them. The micro-blogging platform that Twitter is obviously not intented to create friendship for people like you, but just server YOUR ego. You just admited that you’d like to fake-follow the 5000 or so people that follow you. That means that you already know who your real friend are and who you want to follow. That also means that Twitter fails when it comes to help you create new friends.
I appreciate your effort in somehow making this system(twitter/friendfeed) more popular than social networks. But this system is for nerds who are actually fools. And also for business purposes for which im following you/techcrunch. Normal mainstream citizen hardly uses these services, better u give up this kind of efforts better for u.
Welll….
I just created a Twitter account and I honestly don’t understand why one would need this. Kids maybe, but grownups?
In my opinion a lot of these Social Network initiatives are not adding anything social at all. They stimulate hitting your refresh button every 5 seconds and terrible design.
To me one of the few social companies is Meetup. It actually tries to get you away from your computer…
Cheers!
well said, i too – agree that Twitter is about petty daily bs
nothing more, nothing less.
@Gee & @Lawrence – I disagree. It’s about a) connecting with your existing friends who tweet and/or b) finding strangers who have something of interest to say. There’s a lot of noise, but with a little time invested you’ll find something of value.
You’re free to use or ignore the service, but if you dismiss it as totally worthless it’s the same as reading an opinion column in a newspaper that you don’t like and deciding that all newspapers are pointless.
I don’t agree as Twitter being petty. If you follow the right people, you stay informed. I look at it like a user generated headline news. I would never have know the attacks in India…it was never covered on CNN or any other news source.
And yeah, I learn a bunch of new things everyday!
why don’t you just use TweetDeck and make a group of the core people you want to follow ??
I was just going to suggest this. I’ve been using TweetDeck too, and the group feature seems to at least temporarily solve this problem.
@Michael – this is a great idea though.
TweetDeck is a desktop client, so it doesn’t have the portability and persistence benefits of the cloud. The solution to this problem will eventually be released as a groups API (probably by Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be) that TweetDeck and other clients can leverage.
Spot on.. the tweetdeck approach in server not only solves Mike’s problem but adds significant benefit to the service in those other ways. Twitter really has 2 distinct uses. One is to have a river of information that you dip into on occasion, but don’t care if things fly past. The other is to follow specific people who interest you and wanting to read their every word. I don’t live on twitter, so I often find myself reading individuals archives who I already follow to catch up on the old stuff.
Livejournal has a similar issue, especially in Russia. There are users with thousands of “friend of’s” (people that have “friended” or in Twitter-speak are “following” someone). There is also a concept of “mutual friending”, which means that you’ve returned the courtesy, when added as a friend.
While on the surface this creates some tensions, it also defines how the network is being used. Ultimately, friending and mutual friending are two different methods of interaction and usage: one for real friends, another for fans of someone’s content. On the product level, there is no difference and probably shouldn’t be, as it would complicate things.
I thought you could group and filter your friends in LJ and read the groups separately. Hasn’t this feature been there for, like, years?
He’s just muddying things. You’re right: on LiveJournal when you friend someone that doesn’t mean you get to read their friends-only posts – not unless they add you as a friend in return.
Even then, as you suggested, a mutual friend can be excluded from seeing your posts through the use of keyword filters. LiveJournal is a complicated world: much like a long maze in a dark cave. If you can feel your way around you’re fine. Here’s a few examples.
Let’s say tomorrow I add Mabel as a friend on LiveJournal. Mabel is a great writer but doesn’t know me from Adam and doesn’t particularly care for my work so she doesn’t add me back as a friend.
If she makes “public” posts I can read them whether I’m her friend or not. Anyone can. But if she makes “friends-only” posts I cannot read them. I must be her mutual friend for her “friends-only” posts to show up on my “Friends” feed.
If she does decide to mutually return my friendship, but doesn’t want me to read her private stuff, or let’s just say she wants to gossip about me behind my back (uh-oh!) she can stop me from seeing posts about her private stuff and me by using keyword filters as if I was not her friend at all.
It’s everything Mike could want from Twitter – the ability to filter, read, and post selectively- or to post just to yourself, like a private journal – it’s all in there.
this post really highlights Michael Arrington as he really is: a man of the people! Bravo Michael! You are one of us and you like us, too!
I think the inability to group friends or direct messages at a group is perhaps one of the things that has been holding Twitter back from going mainstream. I’d like to be able to use it to with my family and close friends (if they were on it) without being noise to the tech people who follow me.
“holding twitter back from going mainstream”?
um.. what exactly is there left for twitter to accomplish to earn that accolade? or better yet, do you live in a bubble?
What you can do is to follow someone and then right away unfollow. He will receive the notification email anyway but you wont follow him anymore.
this appears to be a decent solution and if they ‘bust’ you, you can just say you dont know what happened.
You can point to Twitter’s deleting of random followers and say “Must have been them. And they won’t let me add you again for some reason”
Sometimes, using a screwed-up service that doesn’t work right can be an advantage
why did you think you’d get some criticism? this is a great idea and am sure it would be welcomed by many people!
This is a pretty solid observation… I like the idea of being able to define a subgroup rather then fake follows. Whats best is that Twitter does not even have to take a risk on development, all they need to do is measure how increasing ‘follows’ is affecting how Twitter users are using the service. if I, on average, add 5 follows a week and if this causes me to spend less time on the site reading tweets or if I scan tweets faster than ‘normal’ it would clearly indicate I am reaching the limit of consumption. Twitter already has the stats, they just need to see what percentage of their community is struggling with Michael’s symptom.
Nay to fake subscribe/follow…
Yay to grouping, advanced filtering and more control over consumed feeds. Looking forward to new features.
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/24bba6c373f542e3e6929c30ec6d07a2?s=80&r=any
Very intresting Idea, but it seems to me that there shoud be something you could do for som eone liket that, maybe use a referrals system?
http://tech4000.blogspot.com
Anyone who was offended by something so trivial needs a better sense of perspective.
More generally it is a problem, especially on FB. We need the ability to differentiate between actual friends (who we meet up with regularly), contacts, acquaintances, etc.
+1 to the parent
Getting offended by not reciprocate follow is beyond ridiculous in the first place. And trying to play nice by faking a follow is even more absurd. What about instead of pretending that you care about what every random person on the web has to say you be honest, keep the list restricted to only the ones that actually matters and show that to the world?
Twitter already have a bunch of more important issues to work on like getting IM integration back (before everyone migrates to laconi.ca/identi.ca) and solving the scalability problems. Lets keep it simple, no need for feature requests like this to add up bloat on the service.
Growing up is easier than workaround a silly problem the wrong way.
I’ve always said that I would like to have a “top friends” or similar in Twitter… a core group of people that I can always get txts of their updates.
I use Twhirl, but I have way too many followers and I follow way too many people to make it very useful. Having a top or favorites friend list that I can personally keep track of would be great.
like you’ve said before – the next big thing are social network noise reduction features
Michael,
The new way to follow is called “Focus”. It allows one to monitor a smaller focused group of people one is following. You can add or remove people from the “Focus” group quickly and easily.
Who owns the TwitterFocus.com domain?
Ok, the idea is now out there, who is up for the challenge to develop it?
Best,
David
Why reinvent the wheel?
It’s more about knowing where it’s already been done.
http://crowdstatus.com/Default.aspx
No, I’m not affiliated in any way.
Michael,
Surprised your not using Tweetdeck (air app). It lets you sort and organize in many ways, as well as group. Quite handy.
http://www.tweetdeck.com
FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com) has a solution to this in interest levels, these let you group people into five groups, so you don’t need to read all the people you ‘follow’ on twitter – just the ones you care about – they won’t know that you don’t actually read their stuff. We have also have tags to group people.
FriendBinder is currently in private beta but we send out invites pretty quickly
Only power users need this, and they don’t use the twitter site very often. Just like those that are ‘email bankrupt’, this is a rare problem. The difference is using personal vs. commercial accounts. Techcrunch on Twitter is a commercial account, FYI.
Twitter clients (eg. alert thingy, twhirl, etc.) are the obvious choice here for providing filters. Maybe use groups, as many mention above, or just single boxes that will turn off/on a given person’s tweets.
Increased communication = Decreased signal:noise
Is data available that shows how many users may encounter this problem? It would be very interesting to know that out of the X users in the Twitter community, what percentage have certain # of users (out of the 2 million twitter users, 3% have 100-150 followers).
It’s a practical idea that you have, but I hope its not just a case of the unsilent minority.
Would an alternative be to offer a “Friends” group, an “Associates” group, an “Industry/News” group?
“what I really want to do is have a core group of friends that I watch. ”
Is that Tweeter’s problem or Twhirl/Tweeterdeck/whatever ?
I definitively see your point here, but the problem can be easely fix on the client side, IMHO. Ask Loic, he can do something about it in the next Twhirl release
Just go in disguise. Or are you incognito already?
I still feel there is a market for a “Who am I kidding?” plan on Verizon and other carriers.
You basically get a great phone with all the features to rock out with but since nobody likes you… any calls you make to your voluminous address book synced to the cloud will go straight to their voicemail.
Benefits:
1) No awkward moments when they pick up because callerid didn’t show them who you were as they make excuses about how they can’t talk or “can I call you back” phrases.
2) You don’t hear several rings before going to voicemail where you imagine them looking at the phone and saying “Oh, not him AGAIN” under their breath
I think this would be popular with people that use their phones for everything except real time duplex audio.
Interesting but deceptive. Catch 22 situation isn’t it. Don’t want bad attention, but don’t want to have to follow people.
I prefer the up front approach. I prefer to be told the truth. But, then, I don’t take everything personally.
Overall, I like you alot… but I am sorry, I don’t agree with your idea. Eventually, people will figure out you’re not really following them and it will offend them even more and get you in even more “hot water”.
Are people offended when one marks RSS posts as read? Sometimes the volume is overwhelming and you just need to clear them out.
What about having followers that never really get into Twitter, should one get mad about their following but not reading?
Whatever the Twitter solution is, it might be similar to RSS ‘mark as read’.
Thoughts?
People should just deal with you not following them back. Dunbar’s number is only 150.
Michael
How come that each time I try to add you I get message that something went wrong ? I sometimes think you blocked me true-false?
Couldn’t. Agree. More.
wow, twitter got on that request pretty quickly.
http://www.twitter.com/fakefollow
good thoughts. I don’t have the problem of having literally hundreds upon hundreds of friend requests. My networks are smaller (which I like). But even I have a smaller handful of friends I like to keep much closer ties with. On Twitter, I do it via SMS messaging. My small handful of close friends (about 10) I have on SMS messaging. The rest, I hope to catch in the timeline or in my replies tab.
As for FriendFeed… I’ve been actively trying to narrow down the content there. Because I see friends of friends content, and so much of it is redundant, I think the need there is even greater than in Twitter.
Agreed that it is ridiculous when people are offended at the lack of reciprocation. Especially when the system does not have an effective way of notifying you of new followers except for the emails, which are frequently not working. There are so many ways following and followers could be more appropriately handled WITHIN twitter in the short term before groups or other functionality are established. The most obvious, in my opinion, would be the simple ability to sort (by follow date, following:follower ration, location, even alphabetical!).
On a side note, one time I was actually semi-offended in real life by a twitter follower was an occasion when someone had followed me (that I didn’t know except by proxy), I followed back, and when I met them in person they had no idea who I was. So, why in the world did they follow me (not speaking of a spammer).