I read a superb blog post "Who is your Information Filter?". I think Hutch makes an important point here (text in bold is highlighted by me):
In an equal world, information shared by any of your
friends will merit click-throughs and discussion. But the practical
reality is that some people will be more “equal” than others in terms
of driving the discussion agenda. There are two highly correlated
components to that:
- Number of subscribers
- Reputation for identifying what is interesting
The sheer number of subscribers make some people Information Filters.
The big power users on Twitter: Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble,
Jason Calacanis, etc. These guys really drive discussions around ideas,
opinions and news. If you subscribe, you can’t help but be overwhelmed
by the discussions they can kick off.
Subscribing to somebody's feed is like a commitment. On social network sites, your actions often speak for themselves. The posts one comments on or likes are quite predictive of who you subscribe to. This is what I found from the analysis of the "likes" in FriendFeed. The following graph shows the probability that a user A subscribes to a user B, given that User A "likes" k or more posts by user B. Typically, if a user has 'liked; more than 3 posts of another users there is over 80% probability of a subscription.
On one hand, this is because users are more exposed to posts from those whom they subscribe to. On the other hand, as the number of such actions between two users increases, so does the probability that there will be a continued commitment in terms of a subscription. Similar trends are observable from the "comments" graph.
The way I see it, an important implication of this is ensuring that the social network makes it possible for users to find and "try out" feeds they might "like". Findability and explorability of social networks allows users to initially explore posts from others and then decide which of these users they would like to pick as their "Information Filters".
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