For Whuffie's sake, join the Twitter Liberation Front

One of the most interesting "non market" markets in Social Media right now, and one that is a real poke in the eye for online Social Capital/Whuffie/etc fans is the Twitter Suggested User List, or SUL. Being on the list is the difference between having a few thousand followers (or maybe a few tens of thousands if you were very well known in social media circles) and having many hundreds of thousands of followers.

This is because the vast majority of new Twitterers these days are joining the service without the network of friends that earlier adopters had, and are instead being pointed to the SUl for suggested people to follow. Ergo, being on the list means you get hordes of followers.

So what drives inclusion on the list? From observation, those who make the list are fairly eclectic, and one suspects the only real common factors is they are Friends of The Founders (or at least have some arm to twist). Robert Scoble's post here makes an interesting list of people who are not on and could be - though there are too many Friends of Robert there in my view - but his point is made that the SUL is no way meritocratic and I'm sure anyone could make a similar list. I recall being amazed that the Guardian's Tech blog was on the SUL, and the BBC's was not.

Jason Calacanis was not on the list last year, and his public plea to get on was to offer $250,000 as that was what he valued it at. He's still not on it, and languishes at the 75,000 folower mark whereas say Mashable's Pete Cashmore has 1.54m. I would argue that pre-SUL, they were similar sized lights in the New Media firmament - or at least certainly not at 20:1 difference

Now, students of the InterWebz will know this as Yet Another Power Law (YAPL). where those wot have get more and those wot haven't get shafted - its a long tale of woe. But the Twitter SUL is also that most dangerous of antisocial tools, a non-market market. It has enormous influence in the Twittersphere (and increasingly outside it, as PR agencies etc start to look at one's number of twitter followers as signs of influence outside the social network) but is capriciously generated (like the favours granted the by kings of old) rather than meritocratic, and gives great power to the holders of the keys.

It also completely f*cks up any attempt at getting equitable Social Capital (aka Whuffie) systems going in Social Media if one can have these Deus in Machina ratchets going. In fact, its even less fair than the "buy your way to success" model used by celebrities, as by and large with them you know what is going on.

Its also a strong sign that Social Networks can be organisationally more Feudal than Friendship based, more like Kingdoms than Democracies. All those things we fought for over 500 years in real life social networks are being overturned in electronic ones, and given we are holding these up as potential "Government 2.0" organisms......

OK, OK perhaps thats getting a bit too melodramatic, but you get my drift*....and every Social Media sleazeball has worked out the power of this, especially as most of the SocMed Whuffie fluffballs haven't yet clocked the risks, so the arbitrage is huge.

So, how to solve? Scoble's view is that one should:

Get rid of the list altogether. Turn off follower counts for everyone and come up with a new “engagement score” that is more focused on how you use Twitter and how people engage with you. That’s more important anyway than how many followers you have, especially since so many followers are lurkers at best or bots and spammers at worst.

As we explained above though, it is unlikely that the SUL owners will get rid of it, its far too valuable a tool (and may well one day be revenue generating). Other options to neutralise it are:

- Onramp systems (eg Tweetdeck) generate their own (and they should, given the power it drives)
- A mass Twitter movement to generate its own SUL via personal recommendation (yes, it will be spammed, but at least its user controlled to an extent)
- A mass Twitter movement to lambast those on the list and ask people to un-follow them. One could imagine people turning their avatars red or orange or purple in protest for example.

I like the last one most - lets call it the Twitter Liberation Front! Next up we need a Manifesto! Something like:

"We, the Tweeple, will not be guided in our followership by the narrow interest of a twadre of self appointed twapitalists, and demand that:"

Carry on in 140 character points of order......we shall call it the Communitiest Twanifesto.

Join Today, the revolution starts in your laptop! You have nothing to lose but your Whuffie!

Update - on another tack, Howard Lindzon makes the point that:

If this Twitter Suggested List is the best Twitter has to offer after 3 years, they should be ashamed. The new web is about discovery and filtering, but forcing people to do it because ‘it’s easy’ or others will do it, is a ridiculously lazy and negligent. If I need Twitter’s homepage to discover JetBlue and Dell, Tony Robbins and Ashton Kutcher…continue to count me as unloyal to the brand. If I must use Twitter’s home page to make these discoveries still in 60 days, the investors should have a clause to get their money back.

So, the Twitter Liberation Front could be doing good by doing well

(*A serious aside - the point about Digital Feudalism vs Real Life Democracy is treated in jest here, but is quite serious given the impact and reach of these systems and the uses to which they are being put)