NY Times on the SUL 

In this morning's NYT, there's an article on Twitter's SUL. It's excellent. I recommend everyone read it carefully.

NYT: The Tweet Smell of Success.

Here are some excerpts.

"Twitter has become a kingmaker of sorts, conferring online stardom to a mix of writers, gadget geeks, political commentators and entrepreneurs."

"...an actor like LaVar Burton, decades away from his glory days as a star of the TV drama 'Roots,' has a personal audience of 635,000."

"A writer with an interest in comic books can become the expert on comic books..."

"Did he realize he was helping to create an arbiter of popularity? 'We didn't think that far ahead,' [Biz Stone] said."

"The list is cobbled together by a team of employees whose identities were withheld"

"Ms. Sampson said 'there's sort of a criteria' for the list 'but not really.'"

Finally here are some comments and background that led to this.

Comments on the NY Times piece 

A lot of people told me to stop writing about it, but Twitter's Suggested User List was just plain wrong, and I was sure that it would become more evident over time, and it has. Here's a brief recap.

1. Until early this year, follower-count was evolving as a user-developed way for Twitter users to give authority to each other. Like all things in Twitter, it was crude, a better version could have been designed, but that's the way things work in Twitter.

2. People like Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte, and to a lesser extent myself, brought authority with us from other places. In this way we were investing in Twitter, every bit as much as Union Square or Spark Capital.

3. The major tech pubs (Mashable, Om, TechCrunch) mostly ignored Twitter. They had much lower follower counts than the people above. Same with the celebs, Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, etc who weren't present at all until early this year.

4. Follower-count worked very much the way eBay users rate each other, same with Amazon.

5. The reason follower-count was so big was its huge visibility in the user interface. It was the biggest number you'd see when you clicked on someone's profile. In FriendFeed, where follower-count is visible but fairly buried, it isn't a big part of the culture. (I don't have any idea what my own follower count is in FF, in Twitter it's about 23K.)

6. Then Twitter adds the Suggested User List to the mix. The way I discovered it was noticing that @anamariecox's follower count, which had been around 3000, had jumped to 40,000 then 50,000 then 60,000, all in a matter of days. No one could figure out why until @ev posted a comment on a blog explaining. Then we could see the effect all over the place. All kinds of random people were jumping in follower counts only because they were on the SUL.

7. I wrote a piece on March 12 asking if a reporter could accept so much extra juice, for free, without disclosing.

8. Then the celebs come. Kutcher's campaign. Oprah. Cover of Time. Etc. Twitter explodes. Good for them. In the meantime, our investment is swamped, more or less lost. I don't begrudge celebs for their followers, as long as they earned them, as long as they brought users in as we did in step #2 above. What I object to, what anyone would object to, is Twitter gaming the system to favor people who did nothing to earn their follower count.

9. That's where it stayed until this morning when the NY Times ran a piece that more or less lays it out the way I've told the story. They add things I wasn't willing to add -- the utter incompetence and lazyness, lack of thought, lack of caring in any way about the users of Twitter. It's time for some sobriety. People don't like being pushed around like this. I've looked into the thought behind the SUL and found the same thing that the Times did. There is none. It's insiders doing favors for other insiders. It's newly rich and powerful entrepreneurs throwing their weight around, rewarding people and publications that do their bidding, and punishing those who are independent.

10. What is so frustrating about this is that Twitter has this incredible promise as a platform for journalism. How ironic that the NYT piece comes out as the people of Tehran are using Twitter, putting their lives on the line, to route around a corrupt government.

11. At some point there must be a way for users to convey authority for other users that isn't spoiled and polluted like Twitter's follower-count is. PageRank for people. We were bootstrapping a way to do that until the company blew it up. This opens the door for Twitter's competitors to take advantage, and come up with a way to convey authority that isn't subject to gaming. No vendor should put their finger on the scale to favor one person or organization over another. I want a level playing field, I want as much of a chance as anyone else. When I find out someone else is cutting in line, I lose all interest. I have lost that kind of interest in follower-count. Give me another field to play on, this one is spoiled. I don't see any way for them to fix it. We're going to have to start over from scratch to do that. Shame. We had a really good thing going.