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If you’re that important, they’ll find you again

Written By: Sol Young on July 23, 2008 6 Comments

Greed

On Twitter, the numbers for friends (people you follow) and followers (people who follow you) are being misreported. The most common tweet today is about one’s follower count dropping off. This is telling of your personality, and not in a good way.

If you’re complaining about your follower count dropping off without your realizing your friend count dropped too, you’ve probably only been paying attention to building numbers. You’re also describing to the world that you didn’t care about losing touch with your friends.

For the record, I first noticed my friend count dropped. Over the year or two on the service, I’ve built up a friend list of ~6200 extremely interesting people (~2100 follow me). When I saw my friend count dropped, I checked my followers to verify. My tweet was, “Wow – number of people I follow and who are following me just dropped by more than 1000 each. Not good!”

While they reboot the service and get your numbers back to normal, take a moment to consider what matters. If you’re that important, they’ll find you again.

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6 Responses to “If you’re that important, they’ll find you again”

  1. kolson29 on: 23 July 2008 at 9:57 pm

    Interesting take on this – I just posted along the lines of “I lost my network” meaning that it is followers and followees that make up the whole………without either of them the service is useless to me.

  2. Sol Young on: 23 July 2008 at 10:05 pm

    I don't think they lost anybody's network (unless they started their network in the last 12 hours ;). However, If the number of followers/following isn't accurate (and in most people's case is about 30% different now – give or take), it's hard to trust the number.

    In any case, I'm not seeing a difference in the flow… Only a difference in the count. Which seems to be all that many people care about.

  3. haveboard on: 24 July 2008 at 12:53 pm

    you're post hit's the nail on the head. I would not have noticed about the numbers changing if it wasn't for everyone freaking out.

  4. Sol Young on: 24 July 2008 at 1:00 pm

    It's amazing how much traffic and complaining is going in to “my followers”. It's scary to lose touch with anyone, but it amazed me that nobody mentioned the people they follow.

  5. haveboard on: 24 July 2008 at 4:53 pm

    you're post hit's the nail on the head. I would not have noticed about the numbers changing if it wasn't for everyone freaking out.

  6. Sol Young on: 24 July 2008 at 5:00 pm

    It's amazing how much traffic and complaining is going in to “my followers”. It's scary to lose touch with anyone, but it amazed me that nobody mentioned the people they follow.

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