Wow. Loic Le Meur asks for a simple feature on Twitter search – the ability to filter results by the number of followers that a user has to make sense of thousands of messages – and the blogosphere calls for his head.
For the record, I agree with Loic. Being able to filter search results, if you choose, by the number of followers a user has makes sense. Without it, you have no way of knowing which voices are louder and making a bigger impact. It’s a way to make sense of a query when thousands or tens of thousands of results are returned.
Of course, I’m pretty sure I can live without this feature, too. I’m failing to get too worked up over it. But the outpouring of emotion from bloggers is surprising me, and I thought I’d seen just about everything when it comes to blogging.
Robert Scoble: “Here’s why it’s a stupid idea: everyone is gaming the number of followers. And, even if everyone weren’t, popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not.” [Ok, but it is a good way of determining how loud that message was]
Dave Winer: “I think it’s a bad idea.”
Sarah Lacy: “No one could be this nakedly egotistical and self-serving.” [this one was my personal favorite. Sarah is clearly worked up over this idea.]
Steven Hodson: “some-one like me with next to no followers wouldn’t even rate showing up in search results even if I started to topic being searched for” [no, only if someone turned that filter on in the search]
Sam Harrelson: “I think this is a terrible idea.”
MG Siegler: “this absolutely would ruin one of the most compelling things about Twitter: That it’s completely democratic.”
All this vitriol and angst over a simple feature request – a button to filter search results by number of followers on Twitter search. If people don’t like it, they can not go into advanced search and hit the button. No one is being disenfranchised, the wonderful faux democracy of Twitter won’t be imperiled. And for those of you who just hate the idea, maybe you can have an option to only show messages in search results that are from users with few or no followers.
Get it together people.
I think its just the thought of this being the way to search Twitter. A lot of the voices are jsut saying that the best way to search it is based on other stats, because searching by number of follower isn’t as helpful tot hem as the other ways.
Honestly, I think there needs to be a very customizable search where I can sort by followers, retweets, replies, length of time on Twitter, etc.
This should be a small part of a very advanced search, just not an option on a search
And yes, I misspelled ‘just’
wishful thinker: “maybe this financial crisis will help us focus on what’s really important”
reality: …nah, let’s focus on the meaningless shit in life like this blog post
I didn’t even mention the financial crisis in my comment…
I’ll be glad when everyone has a domain and “social media” finally poops out.
I wasn’t vitriolic enough. I feel there’s a vitriol gap. Off with his head!!
you were actually the reasonable one of the group.
what do you think of my response? (link on name)
Title of article should have been called “Sort by: Asymmetrical Followers”
* * * *
“Twitter wasn’t designed for whales. It was designed for small shoals of fish. Which brings us to one of the big issues with Asymmetrical Follow – it introduces unexpected scaling problems. Twitter’s architecture didn’t cope all that well at first, but has performed a lot better since the message broker was re-architected using Scala LIFT, a new web application programming framework). The technical approach that is most appropriate to support Asymmetrical Follow is well known in the world of high scale enterprise messaging- its called Publish And Subscribe.”
http://tinyurl.com/63gbwj
If Loic has problems following 7000 tweets on Twitter, which are all text, imagine how much problem people will have if Seesmic ever becomes popular.
If each post on Techcrunch garnered 10 video comments, 2 minutes each, with 10 blog posts per day you might have to employ someone dedicated to listening to them… or ignore them totally.
The problem with Twitter search isn’t the number of results that appear for a popular event, but context.
You need to be able to browse twitter “threads” in context, and then mark them as read.
It used to be easy to do that kind of thing in the cixx / AOL / usenet days, yet somehow Web2.0 has lost this core ability.
According to Arrington and Le Meur I have more “authority” than either of them do because I have more followers to say this: Arrington, you are wrong.
Of course, I’m writing a blog post about why. Be back in a while.
I disagree michael. All search results should be ranked by number of followers. The current ‘democratic’ ranking should be the optional setting. Google uses pagerank to rank search results, twitted should use a similar technique to sort the shite from the clay.
No, that is a bad idea because PageRank is based on links, Tweets should be based on links to the Tweet, or Retweets.
This is an interesting point, but Google also gives a boost to sites that have more PageRank. As a website gathers more inbounds, it has more PR to spread around internally, and gets granted a bit of site-wide karma with the Google juice – so there’s a bit of both types of filtering going on with Google. Depending on where I post, I can start a blog post off at PR5 or PR0, and that makes a big difference in the Google rankings.
I agree it might be useful to have some sort of authority system going for twitter search results — however, I still love watching my live stream — posts from people I chose to follow for whatever reason I decided was important to me.
Search however one would like — better than trying to game, say, google (which, ironically, works exactly the same way as you elucidate above… weighted by “number: of followers – links.
all theses fags have nothing to write about, just trying to get exposure for their rotten blogs. this feature will get rid of retarded spammers with retarded tweets. if you have time to sort through crap, good, i don’t.
No, because a lot of the people with 100,000 followers know nothing about a lot of things that could be picked up in their tweets. A lot of these top tweeters are niche people, and could posts things that have the words in them your searching for, but don’t actually mean anything.
and that’s why you don’t sort results by popularity, or sort by less popular.
Yeh, I don’t think that it is a worthwhile feature, as it has potential to change Twitter for the worst…. Opportunists could more easily use it for self-promotion…
Wake up…what do you think it is already? Twitter is self promotion..not everyone is for profit but you are promoting yourself… It is just a different way to look at the data… what is the big deal? Just a filter..yah…
I don’t think the uproar was over the feature per se.
The uproar was over the notion that more followers give you more “authority”.
I think if the feature hade been “sort by shrillness” (a more accurate description) no one would have got their panties in a bunch about it.
bingo. it was a matter of pompousness and arrogance, not one of feature evaluation…
But they do give you more authority…does the fact that TC has a million subscribers give them more authority? OF course it does…you wouldn’t go to a blog with 1 subscriber and weight it the same as TC, just like you wouldn’t give a twitter account with 1 follower the same authority as one with 10 000 followers. People move in herds.
nah, of course not, if TC has a million subscribers, it does not matter, on the web the beautiful democracy rules and everybody is equal
In what Utopian society do you live in? Nothing is equal in this world. People will tend to the blog with a million subs versus the one with 20…It is basic human nature…
Authority. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Authority: an individual cited or appealed to as an expert. Authority implies you’re more often than not correct about the topic of which you speak.
Strident implies you speak with a loud and insistent voice. Strident makes no value judgment of the content of your words, authority does make a value judgment.
I agree that is the confusing part…what I am trying to say is when I go to Alexa, to technorati or google trends the stats tell me that website does something right. Well in a way number of followers, number of tweets a person makes tells me that that person is doing something write. I don’t think you can have any authority on anything in a 140 letters except to be interesting. So in a way the number of followers is just an indication of who is most interesting or who has best gamed the system. Both are of interest to me..
oops grammar sucks so should not drunk post..
Bang on target Etc. I agree, If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
It’s like saying Google’s inurl search feature is of no use because people might try to game algo by stuffing unnecessary keywords in URL.
I love that it was Sarah Lacy that said. . .
“No one could be this nakedly egotistical and self-serving.”
hey pot. . .meet kettle
I just assumed it was tongue in cheek lol
“I’m failing to get too worked up over it. But the outpouring of emotion from bloggers is surprising me”
Meanwhile people are getting killed for no reason in 3rd world countries and people are dying in Africa but the same people couldn’t care less.
This is normal internet BS. These people have no life, and no clue.
I like the sound of that answer, but it always raises a high-horse BS alarm bell in my mind. What did you, Chris R., do to help the needlessly killed and famished in Africa today, besides posting that repartie ?
Oh stop. Starting fights on a message board like this is another example of:
“This is normal internet BS. These people have no life, and no clue.”
It’s both a good idea and a bad idea. Such are every feature the technology organizes for itself.
Isn’t twitter solely about naked egotism in the first place?
I’m with the “authority does not come with more people listening to what you say” crowd.
I can’t imagine Pepsi being considered an authority on Web2.0 even though many many thousands of people see their ads.
Yes, there should be a feature to improve search by helping you find authoritative sources. That should be on a tweet by tweet basis not a tweeter by tweeter basis.
In any case, isn’t Google’s PageRank a page by page algorithm instead of site by site?
So, Loic just had the right idea backed by a badly wrong metric.
I still want to intern with Arrington, despite the fact that he didn’t quote any no-names in this post about weeding out the no-names.
actually Sean Percival really requested guillotine for my head:
http://www.lala...ur-ran-the-web/
now if you think about it, I did not call for censorship, I never said that feature would be compulsory, just optional.
Nah I actually like you a lot! I don’t even think this is a horrible idea. I’m glad you are in this space, and happy to highlight how you think different than the usual suspects.
Disqus is the new twitter. people don’t want to follow brand names and people. they want to go where the motion is. people want the dialog. Seesmic and twitter are part of the system, but people in the future are going to be anchored to ideas and not as much people. Ideas are bigger then individuals and you understand the community that develops out of them. there is dark side to this as well of course in that ideas are symbolic like political parties and minority opinion gets lost, but I see the writing on the wall. I was not brought here by twitter, but rather I follow the Disqus comments on friendfeed. I came to where the motion was. The people were secondary. Centralization is a cancer, if I am wrong about this then we are all very sick.
Mike,
The number of followers is not directly proportional to influence. it is only related to number of followers they have. Period.
“you have no way of knowing which voices are louder and making a bigger impact” you are only loud if people listen and engage and some sort of action takes place based upon the message. One might be better served to see how a retweet travels to measure influence and how many layers it ripples and spreads through.
I understand what Loic is after. He is looking for a filter. There are many different ways to filter information from twitter, none of which are a great solution.
It is a custom solution that needs to built and I have been mapping how this might be best accomplished over the past 2 months.
The real issue that fired people up I think was that the number of followers equates to influence. It simply does not.
It is merely an small part of an algorithm that determines influence.
Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
I meant “Authority” is why people got enraged (not influence). Authority is not determined by number of followers.
I know some real subject matter authorities that have 50 followers on twitter. They are not interested in building a big following. Their use case is different. It does not make it wrong.
“Democratic” is so over-used and completely misunderstood by so many that it has essentially become a weasel word in arguments at this point.
I think it might be the ultimate straw man word in online arguments.
Testing the fb connect feature.
With the hundreds of applications running off Twitter’s API, I’d be very curious if this feature does not exist (or is not in development).
It should be a third-party app. It should not be part of Twitter Search.
Sure why not? Its a feature that can be turned on and off – like Toolbars or Firewalls or Spam filters.
Twitter being democratic i think is a stretch no one votes for twits just for people.
Heres the solutions to too much traffic
1. do as perrybelcher – register another twitter account with the people you think are the best tweeters – a Global Elders or Wisdom Group
2. Use groups on tweetdeck and create a groups of good tweeters
3. use search in tweetdeck and put in the people you want and see everyone of their tweets in single column
4. haven’t used tweet tree but sounds like it can group and show conversation threads so you can use that to filter through groups
5. Someone is probably right now working on filtering feature for tweetdeck or tweet tree or twirl so wait a while. it will depend on the algorithm it uses as we have seen ratings between twinfluence and twitoholic differ based on various measures
6. loiclemeur had a problem and suggested a solution and everyone starts throwing stones – ppl need to get a grip its a feature/filter not a change to the core idea of twitter
for the record the entire leweb conference was streamed for free so I think I know when to be democratic too
I find it pretty funny that Loic’s suggestion has aroused such reactions.
I also love how people “explain” to Michael (et al) that the number of followers doesn’t necessarily correlate to authority. No sh## Sherlock. The point is a bit higher order: Twitter needs to experiment more with filtering. Users clearly want to parse information based on a number of variables to help sort through whatever that individual considers noise. As Twitter itself scales, we need the mechanisms to de-scale in context and make sense of madness. Loic’s idea is a good one.
http://twitter.com/squasher98
Oh please, this is Loic Le Meur’s digital way of measuring his penis-size to others. Only in this regard, his wang is analogous to the number of “followers” he has.
Loic, worry more about improving your lame Seesmic project and less about Twitter.
HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER.
I propose an altogether different system. All users of twitter have to upload a picture of their penis. The picture gets displayed alongside the profile pic in search results. Tweets from people with bigger dicks are given a stronger influence rating, and are venerated as gods among men.
Lets all just say what we really mean, gentlemen.
I’m not sure this is as trivial as you think. The selection of any one feature for implementation implies that some other possible feature will NOT be implemented (i.e., the Twitter development team cannot reasonably implement an infinite number of features in a finite amount of time). A better question to ask is why someone would choose this feature over others? Obviously, you could do some prototyping and testing, but my gut feeling is that it would be worse than useless; it would tend to give people confidence that these results had some sort of validity or authority when, in fact, they’re merely a volume level. If the size of the audience is _de facto_ an indicator of authority, then George W. Bush is the most authoritative individual on the planet. Frankly, it smacks of ego-searching and nothing more.
Number of followers isn’t the best way to define who is an “authority” in his/her niche. I would suggest a rating system of some kind that is independent of the number of followers. I don’t trust those numbers anyways. Lots of time, they are artificial. Rating someone based on the kind of content they produce would be useful. Add a rating system then incorporate that to search.
http://twitter.com/pixelbug
(comment from loiclemeur.com)
This is a really bad idea. What if a person with no followers has a good tweet to share with the world?
Twitter is used by many to share thoughts. If this feature was implemented into twitter small voices like mine would never be heard! Only the people with large amounts of followers(eg: techcrunch) would get noticed. I do not like this idea at all.
I wonder what the argument is about. Löic made a wrong assumption that number of followers = Authority. But the essence of the argument remains the same and makes a lot of sense. He is asking for filtering under a new criteria ‘number of followers’. It is also like making a criteria for ‘industry’, ‘country’, ‘topic’ e.t.c.
Löic, could you please change your post to “Twitter: We Need Search By Number of Followers”, so we can move on with our lives.
Who the hell needs to search Twitter anyway? Ridiculous. You’ll find the good tweets by the way they are used: re-blogged, re-tweeted by people you follow, following @ replies, etc. Webcocks ruin everything.
Search is not their core model. If somebody wants to sort by most influential – they should program their own mashup using:
http://search.t...itter.com/about
http://apiwiki....I+Documentation
Remember, Twitter only bought Summize in July:
http://www.paid...h-site-summize/
would you agree that causing an action would indicate some type of useful indication. Like how many times to people click a persons links in their twitfeed. How often they got @replies.
Do they have something like that because it would indicate influence? The ability to cause action which would be interesting to know… Thus when you search twits you can see those who have the greatest influence on others..
Um, is it possible that you mischaracterize the response as an outpouring of emotion, when in fact it is an outpouring of reasons?
So much for dealing with the substantive claims posted by those you so easily dismiss. An authoritative reply would deal with the substance posted by the respondents to Le Meur’s proposal. BTW, I don’t think it’s the feature request that’s problematic, but instead the rationale proffered.
Sorry. SEARCH FAIL.
you guys are still talking about twitter, huh?! Their’s enough twitter posts on TC to start a seperate section on it.
I think the request is fairly reasonable. Twitter, FriendFeed, Technorati and practically every search engine should default to offering more ability to search by specific criteria. I should be able to search Twitter and rank results by “total followers”, “total following”, “most recently updated”, “most retweets”, or any other metric.
As for whether total # of followers delivers more authority or not, if there’s a ranking out there, people will find it. If there’s a statistic, people will measure it and compare it, period. What this would do is just admit as much and get Twitter to implement it, rather than waiting for another third party ranking service.
what kind of culture do you want to encourage? the monoculture of “Yes Men” or do we want real information. Think about successful interfaces. did they offer more options like Windows or were they limiting like a Mac? I think the argument that it would be only an option is stupid. I care because twitter would set a precedent for other networks. I don’t want to see the A-list desease spread.
“Authoritative Tweet”, isn’t that contradictory?
You know, like:
Jumbo Shrimp
Light Tanks
Butt Head
Microsoft Works
do I get to comment? I’m not allowed on twitter at all… but if I were there I’d be pissed if this were a feature. of course I was generally pissed with twitter so my opinion doesn’t count… but if it did we all know big jerks get as many followers and are influential. if you know who I am, how many who know who I am think I’m a nice guy? I didn’t think so. btw… those that think they know me…. they don’t know me… but that is irrelevant, but then again so is twitter these days.
Twitter is so awesome without you. You are why moderating a service is a requirement.
ironically it is moderation that I was asking for Loren. you never really got me. they shot the messenger dumb ass. I believe in boundaries, but those boundaries can only happen if the technology disperses out of the few. the tech industry in the long run will be heading towards GM if they don’t break them up. I’m not asking for chaos. I’m asking for a higher authority and more higher authorities then Loic, Jack or Zuckerberg. If there is no profit model then perhaps it might be of interest to a lot of parties to pay off tech companies now to share their tech with multiple parties. Moderation can only happen if there is more then the hierarchy. you might not like me Loren… but I sure as hell don’t like you stepping on my intellectual property. I’m asking for a moderator just like you are. I’d be happy to get thrown off any network for a cause if there were alternatives. Different cultures need to develop and we need more world views then your puppets Loren.
It’s interesting that nobody has brought up the fact that twitter wasn’t initially intended for asymmetrical broadcasting of tweets either:
http://www.redm...web-20-pattern/
Chew. On. That.
Twitter search functionality is overly simple and fairly useless. There is so much more i would like to be able to find thru search such as relevant conversations, people and content.
It would be great to be able to create customized mesh RSS feeds based on keywords/tags that would then filter all the Tweets to get be all the great info that i would like to follow.
oh pls., keep that authority thing to those looking for a halo in their heads. . and do you really know all those following you? some just want to be seen with you.
i like twitter as it is now. if you want the search button [why do we need this anyway?, do you have all the time in the world to search what people are blabbing?] put it there by all means. but to have that authority thing again, please, enough of that!
oh pls., keep that authority thing to those looking for a halo in their heads. . and do you really know all those following you? some just want to be seen with you.
i like twitter as it is now. if you want the search button [why do we need this anyway?, do you have all the time in the world to search what people are blabbing?] put it there by all means. but to have that authority thing again, please, enough of that! some people are just too insecure they need to have a crown all the time. do others care of your authority? nah.
If you run an internet service that people talk about, yes, being able to search twitter to see what people are saying about you is extremely useful.
The way I see this is that search is a very personal thing, we all search in different ways to get the results *we* want. So I don’t agree that (for me) number of followers equates to authority, but if Loic thinks it does for him then so be it, if the feature is there people can use it or not I really don’t see what the problem is, it’s not like Loic’s search results are going to affect me in any way. We are all looking to get the information that we want and the way other people do it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
How does this affect the bloggers? I must be missing something. I had thought that one blogged to give people their views, for one’s self improvement, about news or reviews on subjects.
Why does it matter how you search ?
I seldom use twitter, simple fact is when I want something online I tend not to be happy when I have to wait, in the past twitter has had problems with it’s up time, so at that point I bailed. It does not matter if I have 10 followers or 2,000,000 if my information is wrong it’s useless.
Let people search the way they want. Unless Twitter is now making you search a certain way, or holding a gun to your head to make you use it, then whats the big deal?
Twitter is not a democracy. It’s not even publicly traded. It’s a privately held small company whose creators decide what it will be. So I agree with Patrick. It does not matter what “should” or “should not” be. If there is demand for it, Twitter had better provide it, or any number of unaffiliated Twitter-assist sites will.
I can’t believe that almost two days later, people are still discussing about this issue. What I’d like to see on Twitter is to comment on any posted update by anyone.
But enough about Twitter, Michael, is there any other news happening around the web?
I think it’s more of a technical issue rather than a design problem … remember the scaling debacle? http://bit.ly/XCUT
Thanks.
The mere existence of high emotions around such a worthless issue gives credence to why we need a recession to reboot us.
Get back to work, folks. The bubble is over.
Join the Twitter coup d’état by unfollowing @loiclemeur. See blog post http://tinyurl.com/962gvw.
Mike and Loic: “Make the whole web work to MY liking.”
The rest of the world: “You can’t do that!”
Mike and Loic: “You can to.”
The rest of the world: “Can not, stamp it!”
Mike and Loic: “Can to, double stamp it, no erasies.”
The rest of the world: “Can not, triple stamp it, no erasies, touch blue make it true.”
Mike and Loic: “No no no, you can’t triple stamp a double stamp.”
The rest of the world: “La la la.”
Twitter really does seem to be a very powerful tool for finding information but the overall problem does seem to be distilling and filtering all that information.
One thing that might help, and this may have already been tried before, is to allow people to tag tweets. This would include the viewers, not just the posters. So if i saw a tweet that i thought looked like a breaking news story i could tag it as “breaking”.
Those tags could then be aggregated on some page so you could click on the “breaking” tag and see the tweets that had been tagged the most number of times that way recently. Essentially it would work a little like digg, except that instead of just saying you “digg” something, you could also say you think it is “breaking” or “interesting” or whatever.
This way you could also get peoples impressions of your tweets as well. So if you posted a tweet that you found a cool new CD, it would be neat to see if your friends tagged that tweet as “cool” or “interesting” or just ignored it.