I'm running in to some of this now, but with XMPP and a Jabber client I find far more people can be followed. In my first post on the subject I mentioned this could become a way of gauging one's intelligence… Will people ever be asked, “How much flow can you handle?”

I can't be Scoble since I wasn't a rock star going in to this. I have to make the introductions first. However, my methods are not like a spammer's bulk-add either (though they're admittedly similar in path). I apply a manual filter before adding by skimming each person's most recent tweets and determining if they're someone I'm interested in mixing in to the flow.

Right now I'm turning up the volume. At nearly 2,000 friends, it's still easily readable as a scrolling field of news. Steve Gillmor, @stevegillmor, has a great article on Swarmtracking. His points on filters and alerts are terrific.

Mathematically you're absolutely right about the public timeline vs. following everyone. The trick is to not follow people who bring down the intelligence level of the flow / swarm. Additionally, one can not consume the flow constantly. With <500 one can keep in touch, personally, with most of their friends (assuming the person is intelligent and manages their time effectively). With a flow strategy, it's more like a ticker passing by.

I gotta drop a respectful disagree on a few things here. I'm sure the flow experiment is fun, but I think you might be doing it backwards.

You said last night that “The amount of 'intelligent' comments amongst Twitter friends is orders of magnitude greater than on the public timeline.” It would seem to me that the more “friends” you follow, the closer your flow gets to the public timeline. If you took it to the extreme and added everyone, eventually, your flow would be exactly equivalent to the public timeline.

If you were able to follow your flow and pick out the 9 best out of every 10 posts and then delete that tenth, that would take you down to following about 1000 people today, but you'd have gotten rid of the 100 “worst” Twitterers. I imagine that would improve the quality of your flow in two ways. First, it would get rid of some noise thus allowing for more signal. Second, the poor messages would not prevent you from missing a good message as often. If as in my prior point, you took this to the extreme, you'd only be left following one person (hopefully it would not be @scobleizer).

I think there is a happy medium where you get the benefits of your flow theory without diluting the quality of the messages you receive. I don't know what that number is, but I know that I miss a lot of good stuff and I *only* follow 380 people. I suspect that it's a bit below that after refining the list of who you follow.

One other note, bulk adding, as you mention above, is an easy way to get a lot of followers, which is a great way to get more links to your blog, which is a great way to…you get the point. Scoble's doing it differently in that he follows back rather than going out and adding everyone ahead. The bulk add with an occasional follow back is the same method used by twitter spammers (and email spammers) assuming that they just need a small percentage of people to add them back to build up an audience.

Good luck with the flow experiment. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Cheers,
@ryankuder

I'm running in to some of this now, but with XMPP and a Jabber client I find far more people can be followed. In my first post on the subject I mentioned this could become a way of gauging one's intelligence… Will people ever be asked, “How much flow can you handle?”

I can't be Scoble since I wasn't a rock star going in to this. I have to make the introductions first. However, my methods are not like a spammer's bulk-add either (though they're admittedly similar in path). I apply a manual filter before adding by skimming each person's most recent tweets and determining if they're someone I'm interested in mixing in to the flow.

Right now I'm turning up the volume. At nearly 2,000 friends, it's still easily readable as a scrolling field of news. Steve Gillmor, @stevegillmor, has a great article on Swarmtracking. His points on filters and alerts are terrific.

Mathematically you're absolutely right about the public timeline vs. following everyone. The trick is to not follow people who bring down the intelligence level of the flow / swarm. Additionally, one can not consume the flow constantly. With <500 one can keep in touch, personally, with most of their friends (assuming the person is intelligent and manages their time effectively). With a flow strategy, it's more like a ticker passing by.

I gotta drop a respectful disagree on a few things here. I'm sure the flow experiment is fun, but I think you might be doing it backwards.

You said last night that “The amount of 'intelligent' comments amongst Twitter friends is orders of magnitude greater than on the public timeline.” It would seem to me that the more “friends” you follow, the closer your flow gets to the public timeline. If you took it to the extreme and added everyone, eventually, your flow would be exactly equivalent to the public timeline.

If you were able to follow your flow and pick out the 9 best out of every 10 posts and then delete that tenth, that would take you down to following about 1000 people today, but you'd have gotten rid of the 100 “worst” Twitterers. I imagine that would improve the quality of your flow in two ways. First, it would get rid of some noise thus allowing for more signal. Second, the poor messages would not prevent you from missing a good message as often. If as in my prior point, you took this to the extreme, you'd only be left following one person (hopefully it would not be @scobleizer).

I think there is a happy medium where you get the benefits of your flow theory without diluting the quality of the messages you receive. I don't know what that number is, but I know that I miss a lot of good stuff and I *only* follow 380 people. I suspect that it's a bit below that after refining the list of who you follow.

One other note, bulk adding, as you mention above, is an easy way to get a lot of followers, which is a great way to get more links to your blog, which is a great way to…you get the point. Scoble's doing it differently in that he follows back rather than going out and adding everyone ahead. The bulk add with an occasional follow back is the same method used by twitter spammers (and email spammers) assuming that they just need a small percentage of people to add them back to build up an audience.

Good luck with the flow experiment. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Cheers,
@ryankuder

This has been a very rewarding experience – cheers!