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...But if Twitter, the human-curated information network, ceased to exist? Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about…
The thing is, effort does not scale well online. People have become conditioned to expect convenience; to expect to have the hard work done for them. The rise of mobile usage has hugely fueled this mentality — making it even more imperative for a digital service to be hyper simple to set up and use. If it doesn’t ‘just work’ within a matter of seconds it likely won’t get used at all.
Although I don’t have to spend very much time at all maintaining my Twitter feed now, with six years invested in the service, that’s exactly because I have spent multiple years figuring out who it’s worth my while following (and who not).
Sure there are undoubtedly plenty of folk on Twitter who I haven’t found yet who could expand my network in new and interesting ways. But you can’t usefully follow every interesting person (whatever Robert Scoble says). And, more importantly, I don’t trust an algorithm that’s geared towards maximizing business profits to identify interesting people on my behalf. That algorithm would be working for Twitter’s shareholders, not for my brain.
Bottom line: who I choose not to follow is as core a part of why Twitter is so useful to me as those accounts I do add to my follow list....
Something smells increasingly rotten in the state of social media. it's really important for the social channel owners and the users to think very seriously about the future of social media.