Comments on: Who and How Do You Follow/Friend People?

By: Searching for Search’s Holy Grail | Mark Evans

Searching for Search’s Holy Grail | Mark Evans — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:16:07 +0000

[...] example is the social media market where a search service to find interesting people to friend/follow is wide open for the taking. Think about it, how difficult is it to find new, interesting people to [...]

By: Stuart MacDonald

Stuart MacDonald — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:35:44 +0000

Mark, I am really struggling with this issue myself. I get anywhere from 5 to 15 new Twitter followers a day. I really don’t know any of these people. Do I add them? Do I take the time to investigate? It’s sort of crazy. What I have been doing is adding people who “@” respond to me, or who I know. The rest will have to wait until I can get to seeing whether I want to add them or not. Not a great use of time…

- Stuart

By: JimAtJaxtr

JimAtJaxtr — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:01:34 +0000

Recommendation engines seem to kind of be growing in popularity. Obviously, Digg has theirs which suggests stories and friends to you. I’m a bit wishy-washy on it though. I think a lot of those new groups to play in will show up on Ning.com. That’s still very early in it’s adoption by the masses, but it allows for niche social networks around specific topics. Then you don’t have to go looking for friends quite so much because the topic draws you together. For instance: http://socialnewscentral.ning.com/

By: Daniel Gibbons

Daniel Gibbons — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:06:45 +0000

Here’s the difficult part of it… So much of the searching for “friends” outside of existing networks is about promotion more than any kind of search for genuine connections. I’m not necessarily referring to out-and-out spam, but more just the extent to which more and more of us are blurring the lines between social and commercial worlds.

Is this a bad thing? In general, yes I think it is. The reason it’s hard to find who to follow / friend on Twitter, etc., with the kind of genuine intentions you’re describing, is because most of the social media interaction patterns are a tiny fragment of what it takes to form real relationships.

By: Mark Evans

Mark Evans — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:38:31 +0000

Mark,

I agree the information would depend on how much information people would be willing to provide. Another angle might be if this search tool was able to crawl someone’s social media activity to pick up on keywords. At the very least, it would give people another way to find friends and followers.

Mark

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:51:57 +0000

This would actually be good fodder for a blog post instead of a comment, but I’ll try a comment.

It seems to me that you are describing a kind of compatibility application (eHarmony without the romantic angle?) to help you find potential contacts/friends. It may have imperfect information, based on what’s out there in the cloud and what this application asks the user to contribute, so it’s already a bit hindered.

It certainly seems possible. Will it work well? I’m skeptical.