Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2009, Omar Shahine
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Dare has a good post on how the notion of “Fan” or “Follower” is a key feature that every social network should have.
In general, I agree that being able to support the notion of super-popular users who have lots of fellow users who are their "fans" or "followers" is a key feature that every social software application should support natively. Applications that don't do this are artificially limiting their audience and penalizing their popular users. Does that make it a core pattern for "Web 2.0"? I guess so.
In general, I agree that being able to support the notion of super-popular users who have lots of fellow users who are their "fans" or "followers" is a key feature that every social software application should support natively. Applications that don't do this are artificially limiting their audience and penalizing their popular users.
Does that make it a core pattern for "Web 2.0"? I guess so.
However, when thinking about Twitter, there is really a couple of things going on.
Unlike most social networks which require 2-way reciprocal relationships, Twitter essentially has one way relationships and allows for a two way relationship if both parties follow each other.
But, they also allow users to have “protected updates” meaning I cannot subscribe to you unless you approve. This is a bit strange from the social networking model because it’s still a one way relationship with approval required. I do not have to reciprocate by following you in return.
Now, that’s all interesting, and fine but the real problem with Twitter is that I have no clue who is following me. I mean 10% of the people that follow me use their “Real Name”. Without real name I can’t make any determination if this is some one that I want to reciprocate. I think this is the #1 flaw with Twitter. Further if I browse my followers or some one else most people have fairly useless “handles” that don’t do a good job identifying who they are.
Contrast this to Facebook where everyone has a First and Last name and it’s clear to me who is who.
In closing, blogging has always had the notion of Fan or Follow. This happens when I subscribe to your RSS feed in an aggregator like Google Reader, Netvibes, RSS Bandit etc. However, it’s completely anonymous, so I never really have any visibility in my audience. Kind of like Television. Blogging would be interesting if there was a way for authors to discover who their readers are (assuming the reader allowed for that and there was corresponding technology).
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