A Listers beware - the e-peasants are revolting...

There is a zeitgeist emerging on the usefulness of A-Listers, something we alluded to a few days ago (see here) - first today, Wadds blogged this morning that:

Will McInnes has listed Twitter insights including a comment on A-listers

A-listers don't work for me in Twitter - too noisy, too newsy, too me-me-me - my favourite people in Twitter belong to Brighton or to the social media (inc. tech PR, enterprise software etc) melting pot, my real world communities...

A-list Twitter users (Tweeters) are characterised by a huge volume of posts per day, follow a small number of people yet have a large number of followers and rarely engage in conversation.I culled half-a-dozen A-listers from my network this morning. They are far too noisy (large volume of posts), ego-driven and I’m not interacting or learning anything.

I’m not alone. Here’s reaction after I came clean on Twitter.

- beneboy @wadds am thinking of doing the same re A-listers, especially the cartoonist.
- freecloud @wadds I feel exactly same re A listers, I've culled a few and am getting ready to cull quite a few more. Is it me or are they getting worse
- tim_hoang @wadds I don't pay attention to A-listers. Twitter is a means of having conversations with people I could go down the pub with
- r_c @wadds - A-list twitters, no value no audience
- joshuamarch @wadds No, twitter is a tool, use it how you want!
- jopkins @wadds Not harsh at all. I just find it fascinating. They never seem to sleep or give it a break
- markpinsent @wadds no mate. Just done the same myself

.

And then, this piece on the (dis)Economies of Friending - after going through all the issues with A-Listers, and the illusion of "democracy" in what are very heirarchical structures, such as:

I got thinking about this the other day when I wrote I wrote my post called "You know it’s time to say good-bye when…." where I questioned the value of friending some-one who had no intention of doing the same back. Following that post I starting thinking more about the whole idea of what I would call The Economy of Friending with the principal idea being that we offer up our friendship via these various networks in exchange for reciprocal action by those we have friended......

.....The problem is that this economy of mutual friending is bound to fail. It is inevitable because not everyone is a Robert Scoble who will friend anyone who comes his way. In fact the majority are more like Dave Winer who is proud of the fact that he has more followers than those he has friended. Many like Dave have created a closed circle and no matter how loud you might like to shout they are never going to hear you; and if by some freak of broken electrons they do see you jumping up and down in the crowd that surrounds them they’ll just ignore you. You aren’t a part of that closed friends circle and unless you are a really good ass kisser the chances are you never will be

All this is fairly standard (un)fare stuff - Zipf's Law is alive and well and living in Blogland. But he then gets to what to me is the real nub of the issue:

Through all these social networks and other forms of friend based networks (i.e.: aggregators services) be have been made to believe that the more friends you can connect with - regardless of whether it is one sided or not - the more popular you yourself will appear to be.

The keyword hear is appear because the reality is that half the people that you either have friended or have friended you will forget about you or why they friended you in the first place. As for your own lists when was the last time you went through those hundreds; or in some cases thousands, of supposed friends and even remembered who the hell they are and why you have them in your list to begin with.

Which goes back to Wadds point - at some point, if the A-Listers aren't adding value, they will be turned off beacause alternatives exist (including, increasingly, the mainstream media again). And I would argue that they initially had 2 parts to their value proposition:

(i) Being "in the groove" and being the dudes able able to tell us the news
(ii)Being great writers in their own (w)right

Well, now that the hoi polloi can get online and networked and find each other, point (ii) has been commoditised - there are loads of great writers - which is probably why the A-List are so keen to always hop on to the new New Thing early (Will we see a Seesmic shift I wonder...).

More interestingly though, with tools such as Techmeme, Blogfriends and other aggregation services we can find "the news" direct from source, so will the A-Listers increasingly be relegated to being relay stations clamped to the stories on the Techmeme leaderboard (and heck, we can do that too....