That is right, I said it. You’re all wrong!
Incase you haven’t been following all of this blogosphere hysteria, here is everything you need to know about the debate on: Twitter Search: Followers vs Value. Michael Arrington first brought this idea to the masses after Loic Le Muer posted asking for a feature to sort through large amounts of tweets by the number of people that follower the person who tweeted it. In numerous Friendfeed disscussions, most of the top bloggers have been arguing with people on this subject. Robert Scoble has posted numerous times on the issue, and seems to be one of the main people backing up the idea that tweets should be ranked on Retweets and the number of links/replies the tweet gets. Most of the conversations can be followed by looking through his profile.
The fact is that a lot of people want Twitter search to have more capabilities than it currently has. I think either side of the argument really isn’t going to cut it because people want functionality. The fact is that both parties are partially right, or wrong. Having a ‘value’ related to tweets to sort them is very important, but this isn’t something anyone can define. No matter how hard any of try, Twitter was founded on the fact that everyone uses it differently. How can we set what the value of a tweet is if the service is used differently by everyone? You just can’t.
Scoble has used it for a year in order to enlighten himself, while Arrington has piped his blog through letting everyone know another start-up has been reviewed. So many people use the service differently that it is stupid to event ry to define a value for tweets. Maybe Loic wants to find out what was said about Le Web that is heard by a lot of people, search by followers would be very good for that. Robert Scoble wants to find tweets about Friendfeed that caused a lot of conversation, there comes your search via @replies and retweets.
So I think we should call a truce. Both sides have some merit to it. For PR, and marketting in any fashion, finding out whats being heard by the most people(# of followers), and what is being conversed about (@replies), is overall going to give you a better understanding of the Twitterverse.
It has been a crazy holiday season, and just like in a house, if you get too many people in it at the same time for too long, something is going to give.
So lets all enjoy the rest of 2008, and while you are at it follow me on Twitter, Friendfeed, or subscribe to my blog [shameless plug]