Webtropic

I was working on a personal weekend project with Yahoo Pipes, when I took notice of this:

The most frequent feed source used with Yahoo Pipes is Adultfriendfinder. The tag ‘porn’  is not that much used though.

Clicking the link of the adulfriendfinder source leads to dozens of pipes, most of them of elementary functionality that simply  extract an element from the feed of the site.

To Yahoo‘s credit, most of them are also inactive but, still, they show up in the listing. If you click on one, most likely you will get:

My first click was not so harmless though: it took me to a feed that displayed something like a youtube video player, which, when clicked, redirected to web site that Firefox notified me it was blocked.

What a pity that such a wonderful mashup engine cannot find its way into more prominent use…

The more time I spend online (as if it were possible), the more little things can make me change course completely. It’s all about adding up.

Take Ars Technica, for instance. This is a blog I really appreciate. I mean really, really: no crap content, in depth knowledge and coverage, important issues. What else to ask for?

Yet, lately I stopped reading it. The reason being  an old irritation that has become unbearable: Ars Technica does not publish a full feed. Although they have always a good excerpt, in order to read the article you have to click, open (yet) another tab, go to their page,  wait to load and …what did I went there for?  Ah, yes,  .. read.

Why don’t I stay in their blog then and scan the new posts from there?

I can’t.

I read from Google Reader because I want all the visual noise to go away. And I don’t mean only the ads by this. I do NOT see the ads, even if they are there. My eye is trained to skip them.

I mean all the other stuff: header, sidebars, banners, buttons, colors etc.

Google Reader does me a great service by eliminating all these elements that are put there, supposedly, to be more of use to me.

The almost black and white, high contrast pages of Google Reader, is the closest to a printed book I can get. And, for this reason, the easiest to read.

Apart from the visual distractions of the web site, there is another reason: time!  These  precious few extra seconds for the one post, add up for the next and the next, and the next, ad (almost) infinitum.

Were it  for a single post, and  it wouldn’t be worth to mention.

But I am an avid reader. I read lots and lots of posts daily. Having to take one more action (go to this other tab etc) is too much.

And there is a third factor: time again. But not the time spent on reading. The time one has been repeating this process, day after day, month after month, year after year. The lengthier the  habit,  the less inconvenience one desires in the way.

Please, blog  owners: do not allienate your most faithful readers. It is not from them that you get the ad money anyway.

I was trying to comment in Orli’s blog, when I saw this CAPTCHA: “Suroses” in greek means you “got drunk”. Apparently, Google’s CAPTCHA  does not appreciate my comments :)

I often observe little things while  web surfing, worthy to keep somewhere but not really worthy to make a fuss about. Today I decided to use this blog as a notebook for these little things.

It’s a lighter side of blogging…

Here is what I noticed trying to register in Streamy.

There’s been much a discussion lately about the value of having hordes of twitter followers, sparkled mainly by the Twitter‘s  Suggested Users List. Jason Calacanis came to the point to offer Twitter $250K to be  one of the top 20 Suggested Users for two years.

The argument is simple: the more followers you have,  the more people receive your message,  the more power you have to market you ideas, products, services, or even yourself.

This sounds like good old marketing. Is it, really?

My personal experience of twitter and all the other social media is that the social experience does not scale. You cannot actively follow more than a few dozens of people. You cannot subscribe and read more than a few hundred feeds. You cannot subscribe to hundreds of youtube channels and watch even half of them.

By actively following, I mean, paying attention regularly or even occasionally to the message  ‘broadcasted’. I will not delve into the territory of the entailing  ‘conversations‘  because  it is even less scalable.

It doesn’t take to0 much brains to agree to this observation. Even if you are paid to follow other people’s updates, there is only so much you can take and do.

So why people like Jason glorify a practice that can bring little back?

Because it can bring back more than a little but only if two conditions are met:

• 50% of twitter users follow only 10 people or so. If you happen to be  one of those they follow, their attention is guaranteed.
• Not all twitter users are equal. There are people that had a big audience before joining twitter, Calacanis being one of them.  And others that have a bigger audience, who  are not even active twitter users (:think Madonna) . These celebrities  will receive preferential treatment in people’s attention, even if they are crammed among hundreds of others.

Besides, there is little trick that lots of people play,  that adjusts their social experience to their  true capabilities: twitter clients like tweetdeck allow segmenting and  grouping those you follow. If out of the thousands you follow, you are indeed interested in just fifty, you only have to include these fifty in a special group and interact/follow only with them.

In this way, you can follow back without hesitation every single one who follows you, and ignore him for ever after that.

To summarize, a big crowd of followers is valuable if the crowd’s  attention is more or less guaranteed, and this applies only to those of your followers that follow a small number of people or were actively following before twitter.

And here starts the fallacy: actively seeking thousands of followers regardless of their profiles or regardless who you  are does not bring back any profit. It does only pollute the twitter experience with daily twitter spam, driving gradually people away from this medium.

You might argue back that the twitter growth does not concede  with my statement. I can only argue back that a tanker starts turning from the προς  and it takes quite a distance before the turn becomes observable.

Update 24/3/2009: Just saw a somewhat related post here.