David Eckoff raised the question of the maximum number of Twitter followers that a person can have. Dunbar’s number would effectively limit this to 150, while numerous people follow less or more.
I think there is a misconception of what twitter is when compared to real social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook. Twitter isn’t a social networking site. It can be. More often than not when I think of Twitter I think of that scene from Mallrats where Jason Lee discusses his connection to ‘the pulse of the community.’ Twitter is a human RSS feed, connecting users into primarly the pulse of the tech (and related) communities where Myspace and Facebook are for establishing and developing a social graph.
I use twitter to keep in contact with a few friends. But I also use email, AIM, phone calls, and face to face (gasp!) conversations for maintaining my Dunbar relationships.
Twitter is for me to follow people of interest, bloggers I like and respect, and aggregations of news. More often than not, Twitter beats the RSS feeds by an hour, aggregation sites (Fark, etc) by a few hours, and news sites by a day. Whats the value of having my ‘fingers on the pulse’ of these communities? I don’t know. I like it, but I can’t quantify the value. I’d dislike if I lost it, but I’d adjust.
So to me, Twitter isn’t for maintaining or establishing Dunbar relationships. Far from it. If I turn my phone off for a day, I feel obligated to return the calls. If I step away from my email account I react the same. These are people with whom I feel I have a social obligation to read and communicate with. We all know that RSS differs from this. If you step away from a few days, you don’t need read the 10, 50, or 10,000 items that are left. The cream rises to the crop and if something is desperately need to know, then someone will mention it somewhere else. Twitter is the same. If I miss a day of tweets, I don’t need to page back and reread them all (and I can’t until Twitter re-adds the paging feature to the API!) I’ll start at the current day and scan through them. If I missed something important from a Dunbar friend then I’m sure they’ve emailed, called, or messaged me the same details. Why? Because Twitter isn’t a social network!
Kai Davis is a 22 year old student at the University of Oregon majoring in Economics with a focus on design, marketing, and management. In his spare time, Kai is an entrepreneur, jazz musician, web-editor / designer and manager for T.W.E.
Feel free to email or AIM Kai, subscribe to his blog or add his twitter.
