During my monthly new twitter followers processing, I realized that I have a curious informal points system that I run through every single time I look at someone’s twitter page to determine their reciprocal follow worthiness:
1. Is it not in English? -100 points
2. Based in San Diego? +50 points
SoCal? +40 points
SF? +25 points
3. Female? (I know so few of them) +20 points
4. More than 1000 tweets? -35 points
5. Using twitter as an RSS feed for your blog? -60 points
6. Following more than twice the number of people who follow you? -30 points
7. Two+ recent updates regarding what you ate? (and you’re not Chef JoAnna) -30 points
8. Have a website? +20 points
And it’s a myspace page? -40 points
Powered by Tumblr: +10 points
Intriguing "about" page? +20 points
Informative, clever posts on topics I find relevant? +40 points
9. Twitter posts that don’t suck? +50 points
I’d say it takes about 100 points to get followed. Once I hit -100, you’re out. But what I find so amazing is that I go through all these levels of scrutiny before I really consider the quality of the actual content someone’s generating. The twitter posts themselves are LAST. I think I do this because since twitter can be so interrupting, I want to make sure I really trust and value the people I give that kind of 24/7 power to.
And yes…even though I just whipped the logic behind this in a few minutes, I do realize that I’m giving the same amount of points to San Diegans as I am to people who make smart posts. There’s never going to be a shortage of interesting people on the Internet, and I decided several barcamps ago that one of my new platforms is to cultivate a stronger and more cultural community in this city. Giving locals higher priority in social networking services helps me shed that pesky Valley Envy and devote more time to hyping up what’s happening right under my nose.
lisa! this scale is great. it’s funny, but it’s true. i agree with you on many points (although i give bay area a bigger bump). Location, interesting tweets, compelling homepage, non a personal blog, follower ratio.
Perhaps finding people who filter their followings on twitter is another factor as we saw in David’s presentation of identifying core users.
i love twitter for this because it’s so open. nobody let’s you monitor resources like that. I think this kind of user data is quite valuable. can’t wait to hear more on this topic.