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.
Michael Arrington Needs a Fake Follow to Fool You on Twitter.
“This morning, Michael Arrington, co-editor of TechCrunch.com, started his blogging day by complaining and mixing up the meaning of “interest into someone’s content” and “friendship” on a post. He claims the need to fake being someone’s friend to better use Twitter. Not to worry, this is very common in online social networking, especially with egocentric personalities.” Continue Reading…
We have this with interest levels in FriendBinder, description at: http://blog.fri...ls-work-in.html
A FAKE follow? Are you nuts? What kind of insecure wimp needs something like this because he’s worried about an unknown internet goober getting offended that you didn’t reciprocate his follow?
There’s no need to build a tool to alleviate this false sense of gloom. Just man up a bit. Who cares if some unknown dude is upset that you didn’t follow him? Social tools shouldn’t require social excuse tools.
http://crowdsta...om/Default.aspx
Mike I was sure you already knew about this. No one can see your “groups” but you. You can organize multiple groups – such as “Must Read” “Read when I have time” or “Regarding X reads” – it’s all about granularity – and someone has already figured out how to give you control somewhere – even if it’s not Twitter themselves.
n my opinion you need to just take responsibility for your social choices. If you don’t want to hear what someone is doing on twitter, don’t follow them. If that causes social fallout, shrug it off. If people can’t handle your lack of interest, it’s really them that need to adjust.
I’d rather be told that you don’t really interest yourself in my doings (after all you don’t know me), than have fake interest thrown at me.
In FriendFeed, I think we already have Room feature which allows to do this.
Nay to fake follow
Yay to growing some bollocks
This would be incredible to have a “follow without reading” featured in FF and Twitter, and I heartily second q dub: it’s desperately needed in Facebook.
In FriendFeed, you can at least hide certain feeds by people, so you can *kind of* do that, but if you were following hundreds, it would take an extremely long time to do that.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it a fake follow. It’s more of a priority system for followed users, so that you can filter through the noise to see the content you care about, which in this case happens to be those messages with @techcrunch or from people you find interesting and would rank of high priority.
Socialthing (http://socialthing.com/) accomplishes this by letting you choose to “hide” a given friend’s updates from your feed page. This would address the issue you note (you can follow them, but then just hide their updates from appearing on your aggregation page), but it resolves another as well, where one has feeds or follows that post NSFW material that you don’t want appearing while you’re checking your friends’ feeds at the office.
I thought plurk did this well, with the “fan” vs “friend” distinction. However, alot of jackasses posted that they didn’t get that. Also, you’re a jackass if you think that someone else is interested in what you have to say just because you’re interesting in what they have to say.
Isn’t that what Plurk is doing with cliques? Basically, you can “follow” everyone using your main timeline, but you view those only under a specific “clique”.
What works great is following as many people as you like, but then enabling “device updates” for only the people you REALLY want to follow.
This is of course, if you prefer using twitter strictly on your phone.
why not a filtered follow?
So you get the news if and only if tags applied in general or specific to an account are found in a tweet then it shows up…
good
Twitter is already “mainstream”. Granted, that comment was made four months ago and I just followed a link to this article today so the general consensus may have changed since then. Even Barrack Obama knew how to use Twitter to help with his campaign. He obviously had someone internet-savvy on his team.
Sure, it’s not like MySpace or Facebook but that’s part of the allure; I mean, look at what a breeding ground for losers MySpace has become. Twitter is super-easy – even my 70-year-old dad can use it, understand it, and appreciate it.
Also, I say this while having only 1 “real friend” who uses it regularly, but my other friends don’t use MySpace or Facebook either. The rest of my twitter “friends” are just internet-famous people.
As for Fake Following, people do the routine where they friend me and then unfriend me quite regularly. I think it has become a common way to get your name seen and possibly guilt-friended, as he who has the most followers wins. I get the message that someone added me, go to see who it was, and they’re gone. It doesn’t work so well with people who can easily see if you’re following them or not! Maybe better on someone with oodles of followers.