Webware

When blogger Robert Scoble began to post updates on Twitter about the China earthquake, the information spread quickly to other users. Statistically, Scoble is one of the most 'listened to' users of the service.

(Credit: Twitter)

At around 11:50 p.m. Pacific time Sunday night, uber-blogger Robert Scoble posted a short note to Twitter: "@dtan just reported an earthquake in Beijing. Wonder how large it is? Off to check out USGS site."

Of course, as the world knows by now, Scoble was referring to the devastating quake that is already believed to have killed at least 12,000 people.

Some may be skeptical about Scoble's subsequent claims that news of the disaster was flying around Twitter before the U.S. Geological Survey posted anything on it, but one thing seems clear. Because it was Scoble who picked up on the quake and soon began writing dozens of Twitter posts about it, news of the catastrophe and direct reports of what had occurred in China spread a lot more quickly than it might have otherwise.

Scoble, after all, is one of the most followed users of Twitter. His activity on the micro-blogging service is currently monitored by 23,264 people. That, according to the site Twitterholic--which tracks the 100 most followed users--makes him the fifth most followed user of the service.

But what exactly does that mean to Scoble and the thousands who follow his posts? Does that mean he's one of the people whose participation provides the most value? Some observers are looking for such answers in numbers that measure users' behavior: how many people they follow, how many follow them, and the total number of posts they've made.

Twitter allows any user to see the number of people other users are following, how many people are following them, and how many posts they've made.

(Credit: Twitter)

"The many thousands of people who use Twitter do so in wildly different ways," Louis Gray, author of LouisGray.com, wrote in a widely discussed blog post. "I feel there are different categories of Twitter users--from those who have a listening audience, measured by a high 'followers'-to-'updates' ratio; those who are engaging, seen with near equal 'followers' and 'updates;' and those who are more noisy, with a lot more 'updates' than actual 'followers.'"

As part of his post, Gray introduced what he called a "noise ratio," which looked solely at the ratio of someone's posts--known on Twitter as "updates."

For those who make less than one Twitter post per follower, Gray assigned the term "listener." Those in the "middle ground" had posted up to twice as many updates as they have followers. After that, Gray called users "conversationalists" and "megaphones."

"If you look at some of the most visible and vocal Twitter users, like Scoble and (Mahalo founder Jason) Calacanis, if you look at their total number of followers, they have tens of thousands of followers," Gray told me by phone Monday. "Those people must be following them for a reason."

Indeed, many Twitter users employ the updates/followers ratio when evaluating other Twitter users, something they have to do each time they get a new follower and must decide whether to follow that new person in return.

To be sure, making such a determination can be tricky. You might want to follow everyone who follows you, but that can be a time-intensive proposition, since you will subsequently have to wade through every single such person's updates. As anyone who follows more than a few dozen people knows, that can mean a flood of information.

Tracking the Twitterers
But to some people, measuring the value another Twitter user offers them comes from more than just looking at their noise ratio.

"What I (look) at," said Chris Heuer, the founder of Social Media Club, "is the idea that you could see very easily from the number of followers to the number of following, what someone's intention was."

Heuer calls his statistic the "Twitter intention barometer."

"The idea," Heuer said, is looking at "the one number relative to the other. If someone has a very high followers-to-following ratio, that just shows a more intentional use of the service where there might be a lot of people interested in you."

I pointed out to Heuer that well-known writer Seth Godin is followed by thousands of people but follows no one.

"That shows a clear intention to use (Twitter) as a broadcast medium," Heuer said, and not to take part in the larger Twitter water cooler conversation.

One site, TweetStats, allows anyone to get a glimpse of the Twitter activity of any other user. By entering any Twitter account ID, it is possible to see that person's Twitter usage, by month, as well as the times of day they most often post and the people they interact with most frequently.

TweetStats lets anyone see graphs of statistics about Twitter behaviors, including, as this chart shows, what time of day someone is most likely to post updates.

(Credit: TweetStats)

But while TweetStat's creator, Damon Cortesi, said he would like to come up with a way to definitively nail down Twitter behaviors, he's finding that very difficult.

"Everybody uses Twitter for different purposes," said Cortesi, "so the given value of one Twitter user is different depending on your point of view."

Still, Cortesi thinks there are ways to approach the question.

"What I think would be interesting to see is a statistic showing the frequency of updates combined with certain keywords for topics I might be interested in," he said, adding that he's also seeking a system to determine if someone is "chatty, (or) are they picky about who they follow."

Yet through all this, there is a great deal of useful dialogue going on on Twitter. To understand how to access it, it helps to recognize that the value of Twitter as a service comes from its mesh quality. Used properly, Twitter is a blend of conversations between individual users and the people they follow and those who follow them, and all the other people who expand out in an ever-growing ring from any individual.

"I think that's one of the great viral aspects of the system," Heuer said. "By having it open and architected this way, it allows us to find people who might have something interesting to say."

A 'real meritocracy'
More to the point, Heuer said, "It is a real meritocracy at the end of the day," referring to the fact that those who add the most value to the system are the ones who get the most followers.

Yet, some argue that it's not just about how many people follow you, no matter how much our egos want it to be.

"One thing Scoble says," Gray told me, "is that power comes in whom you follow, not who follows you...The more data you can take in, the stronger and smarter you are."

But one thing that's important to realize is that people likely are going to want to measure things if they can be quantified. That's probably why Twitter allows people to see everyone's statistics.

"I think that Twitter understood that if they didn't put (the stats) up there," Gray said, "people would make scripts to do it."

Heuer takes that thought even further: he thinks the peoples' attention to stats has a secondary effect.

"By looking too closely at the stats, it ends up modifying our behavior," Heuer said. "If we care more about the numbers than the engagement, it can impact our behavior."

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

This post was updated at 12:14 PM PT to include comment from Plaxo.

A representative from business networking site LinkedIn has denied a claim from contact management service Plaxo pertaining to last week's controversy over transporting data from one social network to another. According to LinkedIn, it doesn't approve of Plaxo scripts that import LinkedIn contact information.

Last week, Facebook blocked "power user" Robert Scoble's account when he attempted to test out a new feature from Plaxo that synchronized Facebook "friends list" e-mail addresses with Plaxo's contact management system. Scoble's account was eventually restored, but the end result was unclear--and many a Web pundit delved into the sticky, still-evolving debate over data portability and just how "open" the social Web should be. To some critics, Facebook once again came across as possessive and closed-off. To others, Plaxo looked like it was harvesting contact information.

One of Plaxo's major talking points in its mission to "open" the social Web was that data portability applications were already in place for other social networks, specifically LinkedIn. Executives said that LinkedIn didn't have a problem with it like Facebook did.

"LinkedIn was actually very happy about that feature," John McCrea, Plaxo's vice president of marketing, said last Thursday to CNET News.com. "That's live, and has been public for many months, and it's good for business."

But on Monday, a LinkedIn representative responded to a request for comment with an answer that was anything but happy. According to Kay Luo, LinkedIn's director of corporate communications, Plaxo's contact import application violates the site's terms of service--an assertion very similar to the one Facebook used to bolster its now-notorious Scoble ban.

"We did not work with Plaxo on their service," Luo said in an e-mail. "We have clear policies against scraping because it has always been LinkedIn's opinion that people need control over their own information. People who scrape our site violate our user agreement and often violate users' trust. We intend to protect against automated processes where the user may not know what is happening."

Plaxo's McCrea suggested in an e-mail to CNET News.com that it might just be an error in communication.

"I think all that is going on here is some crossed wires over on LinkedIn's side," McCrea said. "We have multiple levels of communication with LinkedIn...LinkedIn and Plaxo both offer export features, and it is their export feature which enabled our LinkedIn Import feature. Before we launched it, there was executive level communication and approval via email."

McCrea added that he believes Plaxo and LinkedIn ultimately have similar aims with regard to openness and data portability. "There have been ongoing discussions between our platform leads on how to deepen (and) improve the data interoperability between the two services," he said. "This is a very popular and uncontroversial feature, which has been live for almost a year."

A data import feature being tested by contact management site Plaxo hasn't gone over too well with social network Facebook.

At least one alpha tester of the new script has had his Facebook account disabled, due to an alleged terms-of-service violation that brings to light the sticky debate over just how "open" the social Web is--and ideally should be.

The controversy hit the Web when popular blogger and former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble--who once gained notoriety when he publicly complained that Facebook wouldn't allow his friends list to surpass 5,000 people--posted a blog entry that revealed he'd been booted from the site.

Scoble, who initially just said that he'd been "working with a company to move my social graph to other places...(which) isn't allowable under Facebook's terms of service," later revealed that he'd been testing out an alpha feature for Plaxo and its relatively new Pulse social network.

Scoble reported that Facebook sent him an e-mail along with the account ban: "Our systems indicate that you've been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script," the e-mail to Scoble read. "This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws."

Plaxo isn't happy. "We have been developing a Facebook import feature and have been getting it ready to roll out for general availability," John McCrea, the company's vice president of marketing, said in an interview with CNET News.com, "and we know that Robert Scoble's 5,000 friends would be the ultimate torture test for a feature like this. Robert was happy to work with us on this, and the paranoid folks at Facebook didn't like the idea of letting Robert get his friends list out, and shut him down."

In a later post, Scoble explained that the new script was designed to take minor information about the people on his Facebook friends list (their name, e-mail address, and birthday) and import it into his Plaxo address book so that he could then sync it with his Outlook e-mail contacts. "It did not look at anything else," Scoble wrote. "Just this stuff, no social-graph data. No personal information."

But birthdays, full names, and e-mail addresses are personal information, and so the notoriously protective Facebook may have a point: Scoble learned that about 1,800 of his 5,000 Facebook friends were already Plaxo members, but what about the other 3,200?

Those e-mail addresses would effectively go right into Plaxo's database, and while McCrea stressed that Plaxo itself would not use the information in any way (that didn't work out so well for the company in the past), someone like Scoble could invite those people to create Plaxo accounts at the push of a button.

Facebook profiles are accessible only to logged-in members who belong to the proper regional, school, or business "network," and the company has been loathe to allow that data outside its own domain.

"Robert would have those contacts, and their e-mail addresses would be in his address book, and Robert could do with that what he wanted," McCrea said, adding that a similar script is already available for business social network LinkedIn--a fact that LinkedIn representatives could not immediately confirm.

"He could sync it with Outlook, he could invite some of them to join him on Plaxo, or he could sync with Yahoo Mail, and next time he used LinkedIn or some other service that allows importing, he could import them into another service," McCrea said.

For Facebook, which has been pitched its teeming collection of user data as a gold mine for advertisers looking to market to specific demographics, letting any of this leak out of the system could dilute the company's "Social Ads" strategy.

But on the other hand, Facebook uses its own data import scripts to gather the contents of members' e-mail address books, to help them find which of their friends are on Facebook already. According to McCrea, this makes the Scoble ban a hypocritical move.

"It's sort of odd that Facebook, who's obviously been able to benefit tremendously from being able to do this on the one side, would put up such a fight on the other side," he said.

Facebook has not yet issued a statement on the matter.

With its launch of the Pulse social network and its vocal support for Google's OpenSocial standard, Plaxo has attempted to paint a picture of Facebook as closed-off and backward, as the rest of the social Web gravitates toward more open standards.

"We believe that this is not a zero-sum game, and in 2008, if we can achieve a vision of data portability, there will be more usage of the social web, not less," McCrea said. "This is not about trying to take anything away from Facebook. This is about users being able to find their friends on all the tools and services they use."

If two months' worth of perpetual hype and hearsay about Facebook have given you social-networking fatigue, it might be time to chug an energy drink--looks like we will see another serious entry into the field on Monday.

Launched by contact and schedule management service Plaxo, this will apparently be a sort of midpoint between the strictly business LinkedIn and the still-full-of-frat-party-photos Facebook.

The rumors started, as they often do, with a single blog post from a well-read blogger. After attending the "Lunch 2.0" event at Facebook's offices last week, Robert Scoble started up a minifirestorm of speculation when he recounted a conversation he'd had there with John McCrea, Plaxo's vice president of marketing.

Apparently, this coming Monday, the address book and calendar synchronization hub will be making a move toward a more standard variety of social networking--aiming directly at Facebook. VentureBeat reports that this new network will be called "Pulse," and it has provided some screenshots.

A screenshot of Plaxo's Pulse, obtained by VentureBeat

(Credit: VentureBeat)

I've e-mailed Plaxo representatives and will report back when I've heard more.

One of Facebook's biggest flaws, Scoble wrote, is that content on the site is completely closed off if you aren't a member. Plaxo will be attempting to address this through extensive privacy controls that include an "open" option. The real kicker is that you'll have the ability to group people into custom categories of friends; this is something that LiveJournal users have been able to do for years, but Facebook currently has no division other than "full profile" and "limited profile" displays. Plaxo's Pulse, from what we've been hearing, will be both open and controllable.

But do we really need a new social-networking site to correct the flaws of the ones that already exist?

Scoble doesn't think that Pulse will be a "Facebook killer," and I agree, but for different reasons. Even though the "grown-ups" have been signing on to Facebook since the launch of the developers' platform gave the company some street cred, it's still largely a time-waster.

Plaxo already has a reputation as an organization tool--do we really think that's going to appeal to the millions of Facebook users who have been installing iLike, Hot or Not, and--heaven forbid--(Fluff)Friends apps on their profiles?

LinkedIn might have reason to worry about this, but unless Pulse turns out to offer something really innovative that we haven't even dreamed up yet, Facebook doesn't. It may, however, give Facebook reason to look into offering more "friends groups" controls.

Former Microsoft evangelist and current ubiquitous blogger Robert Scoble paid a visit to Facebook's offices yesterday and learned something pretty cool: the social networking site's "wall" feature, which lets you leave messages for your friends, will be getting an update tonight to allow users to post multimedia like photos and video in addition thanks to added developer integration.

Of slightly less importance, Scoble also informed his audience that he ate Spicy Noodles at Jing Jing near the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook's office.

Meanwhile, that's not the only news that might be coming tonight on the Facebook front: right now, I'm in Boston to cover the company's dismissal hearing for the much-talked-about ConnectU lawsuit. A Facebook representative informed me that only lawyers will be present on their behalf, but the ConnectU founders will apparently be there and will be holding a press conference after the hearing. We'll see how it pans out.