The Reputation Question
The idea of Twitter reputation has been evolving since the conception of the service. It started out in the simple form of follower counts–the more eyes on your tweets meant the more important and interesting you surely were. This was never completely true, but it was more true then than it is today. The follow/followback culture of Twitter arose in an effort to turn followers into friends. This opened up conversation; made Twitter a place to meet new people; and, eventually, led spammers to software that could mass follow and unfollow anyone who didn’t return the favor.
This leaves us with users with inflated follower counts and false reputation. If you look at Twitter today, the highest follower counts belong firstly to those on the suggested user list (which it seems no one knows how to get onto save Ev and Biz) and secondly to celebrities and spammers. I’m not one to say that celebrities don’t deserve to be highly ranked. Most famous people are more talented and interesting than Joe Nobody, even if they haven’t yet gotten a hang of the service. It is the fact that spammers can gain such numbers and the suggested user list comes pre-loaded on new users (unless they opt-out) that makes follower count a very flawed reputation system.
Luckily, there are two other clear methods to give props, cudos, and otherwise reputation boosts to your friends: by retweeting and favoriting their tweets.
Generally, if I see a tweet that entertains, I favorite it. If I see a tweet that adds value to my audience, I retweet. If both, than both. There are third-party services that track favs and RTs; Favstar.fm and Retweetist.com respectively. If Twitter or another third-party site (maybe it would be a fourth-party site at this point) were to use the favorite and retweet data along with the follower data in some kind of ratio that I’m not smart enough to formulate…we would finally have a reputation system that would do.
I fear “that would do” is the best we can hope for. Tomorrow, the spammers will have gamed our system and there will be whole a new way to use Twitter. Until then, follow, fav and retweet you another day.
