It’s day two of discovering and opening up the flow… (not to be confused with ‘Flow Theory‘)
A couple days ago, after months of thinking about how to consume more information, I was inspired by Scoble’s post to switch off of a standard HTTP Twitter API polling application (Twitterific) and move to a Jabber based client (Adium). It has been an amazing discovery.
Initially, and until yesterday, I was using Twitterific to read posts from ~100 friends. I had SMS updates coming in to the iPhone for friends beyond the normal scope of Internet friendship (wife, co-workers, family). I bumped my friend count up to ~500 before my first flow entry last night
I picked these friends by viewing the friends of some of my other intelligent friends. If I found the last 20 posts from a friend in their list to be interesting and smart, I added that person as a friend of mine. If I found that friend to be exceptionally intelligent, I would review their friends and do the same process to find more. A tree diagram for contact spread would be very interesting!
500 friends created a slow flow in Adium (Jabber client). Today I followed the same process of friend finding and upped the count to 1,100. It seems intelligent people keep intelligent company (thank goodness!) and locating other intelligent Twitterers is not terribly difficult.
The flow speed at 1,100 is roughly 100 updates per 10 minutes (1 tweet per 6 seconds). Sometimes it gets much faster, but it’s easily manageable. With an approximate average of 100 characters per tweet and an average word length of 5 characters, this translates to 200 words per minute. At this point it is at a speed where one could read every post if they weren’t focused on other things, but more is tolerable.
I’m looking to have a flow that is well beyond fully readable. It’s supposed to be a river. I’m guessing this will be in the 5,000 to 10,000 friend range, but as I adapt it should grow. I’ll be growing my group of friends by at least 500 per day for the next X days to see how this works out.
I’m way beyond the point where I can pick out closely related friend’s tweets from the flow without software assistance. This also means it’s impossible to re-route the updates to a phone when away (my wife is happy about this ;). My solution has been to create a second account used only for following family and co-workers. My updates are still sent from the main sol account.
A latent side-effect of making all these new friends and finding all these smart people has been that they (likely, you) want to follow me too. Approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of the people I’ve followed return the favor and follow me. If you’re in to marketing don’t count on this lasting – I’m sure unscrupulous groups will use this against us and we’ll get a lot more careful in who we befriend.
For now, for those I’m connecting with, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for making us all smarter.
Very cute entry and thanks for the add. It is always good to meet like-minded folk. With Twitter I am growing my brood organically. It is easier for me to get to know my friends and take them in a bit as my list expands. Due to work issues I have not been as active and am way behind in my blog. : C ::::::
I like the organic growth approach too, and I'm making many great friends which I'm connecting with via LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
This has been a very rewarding experience – cheers!
Hey Sol,
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
Excellent and well thought out points…
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.
Hey Sol,
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
Excellent and well thought out points…
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.