[Air-L] PS: Who to UnFollow

[Barry Wellman]

PS: One other dynamic I've self-observed:
The more followers I have, the more I get.

While this might seem like Merton/Matthew 101: those who have, get more
I had expected the opposite: a ceiling effect on the truly modest grounds
that I can't be That Interesting to That Many people.

Rather, it appears to be a snowball effect. People who see some of
my tweets on a Peep they are following decide to follow me.

Worth modeling with multiple starting points for the sample.

 Happy Canada Day!

 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
  Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
  University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
  Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
 _______________________________________________________________________


On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Barry Wellman wrote:

> Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:38:18 -0400
> From: Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca>
> To: Bernie Hogan <bernie.hogan at gmail.com>, aoir list <air-l at aoir.org>
> Cc: barry wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca>
> Subject: Who to UnFollow
>
> Bernie/Blurky,
>
> Thanks for your thoughtful post re twitter.
>
> I have often stopped following things such as what you ate for dinner. One
> famous guy who did this a lot got mad at me about my not reciprocally
> following him. I explained why politely, and never heard from him again. I
> assume he's still mad. My first experience with Twitter Politics.
>
> I try to keep almost all of my tweets to my ideas or RTweeting others --
> lotsa pointers to longer discussions.
>
> However, every once in a while I am bursting that was important to me that
> I just have to share it -- such as Bev/my recent Rafting down the Grand
> Canyon or you (Blurky/Bernie) coming to town.
>
> I also use such Tweets (as NancyBaym does) to promote my
> friends'/students' work.
>
> One thing hard to solve is people I usually learn from but who also point
> their daily stuff ("in the garden, painting my shoes"). I've
> half-seriously thought we could have Tweet1 and Tweet2 for ideas vs
> self-reporting posts.
>
> I'm also mystified why so many people (500+) follow me. I don't think I
> give very good value. (One of the first things we learned in the early
> days of computerized conferencing is that people have less useful things
> to say to each other on a daily basis than when they save it up for annual
> conferences.) Some do follow because others have suggested. Others I think
> are collectors of "names", even though no one would accuse me of being
> Ashton Kushner. I know in a few cases I myself am following a famous
> social scientist because he is famous (and verbose).
>
> There seem to be disciplinary clusters (when George Siemens of e-learning
> suggested following me, there was a surge) and geographical clusters (in
> my case: Brasil and Australia) which I assume is word of mouth. I can't
> believe that people who are following 500 have time to read them, even if
> they use Tweetdeck to prioritize. I have barely time to skim the 100 I do
> follow. As I tweeted yesterday, "frittering my time away" has been
> replaced by "twittering my time away".
>
> There are a whole bunch of research projects here, plus the social network
> stuff on who follows whom. Certainly I'm cross-linked with a bunch of
> AoIRish people. I know this because when someone Follows me, I check out
> who else they're following.
>
>  Happy Canada Day!
>
>  Barry Wellman
>  _______________________________________________________________________
>
>   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
>   Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
>   University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
>   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
>   Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
>  _______________________________________________________________________
>
>