Twitter Lists: The New Metric Of Authority
Have you ever stood on a line for an up-scale club in NYC? It’s tough as nails to get in if you’re not “on the list”, but you still do it. You do it because of the social credit that accompanies access to a selective club. It’s similar to the selection process of being picked for a team during a pick-up game when you’re a kid. You never want to be the last one picked. Top pick means you’ve got great athletic skills that your peers have acknowledged, or, in the case of NYC clubs, you’ve got enough social status, good looks, or money to get you in.
With Twitter lists open to the public, I see the same sort of social darwinism playing out in online space. The social elite are on the lists of popular people like @Mashable or @NYTimes—people who command authority in their respective fields. The social commoners of the net are left to only follow those lists, effectively on the sidelines watching from a far.
Technically, this sort of social darwinism has been around for awhile. Facebook’s “Top Friends” app caused its fair share of criticism in the media before. When Gmail first launched, it became a big deal to just have an account. Big enough that people actually paid for invites—similar to the current frenzy over Google Wave. Obviously not everyone can be on a given list. The nature of lists make them exclusionary by design. In the case of Twitter, selection to a given list has a different implication. It’s interestingly becoming a new metric of authority.
Originally, the number of followers people had could give us a good metric to measure the amount of authority a person commanded on Twitter—there are other factors involved, but, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll disregard that for now. On top of this already existing layer of authority, another is being built with the adoption of lists. The more times a person is listed, the more that person is thought to be a reliable source of information, further acknowledgment of authority. Lists are reinforcing the hierarchical structure of Twitter, something the number of followers determined previously. What was originally supposed to be a tool for curating the information flow of your followers is having unintended consequences. The long-term consequences of how Twitter lists affect the Twitterverse will be something to look out for in the future.
Interesting points…although I don’t know how powerful lists really will become because in my experience, many users aren’t really bothering with them or finding them useful. I created a couple for the sake of doing so, but I don’t really find it to be a significant help to me in any way.
I think it’ll become quite powerful. Wide adoption can take a little bit of time, but people will eventually find use for it. Similar to how users created the RT feature that eventually became common practice.
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