adding Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

Thinking about the merits of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect as ways to provide one single online identity for whichever sites you interact with, I realised how hard it can be to find me.

Sure, my two blogs are reasonably well known, I’ve got a reasonable reputation for both my real name and my pseudonym, and all of them are findable via a quick search.

But so many sites still use email addresses as a means of locating people.

A quick total reveals.

1 work email address

1 personal email address on gmail

1 personal hotmail address

1 email address I use for sites involving payments

3 online email addresses I no longer really use, but check occasionaly

1 email address which I use for sites which I’m signing up for and want to filter out before they reach my inbox in case of trust and spam.

So that’s 8 possibilities, plus a few others I’ve used for other projects. And I know I’m more geeky than the average human/internet user/person who doesn’t spend hours on Twitter – but the route I’ve taken to get here hasn’t been particularly unusual. So perhaps finding people by email is becoming less and less practical?

What I think is useful to know

I am a psychologist and I am mostly interested in why we use Twitter: what do we hope to achieve? But hope is a function of our ability to see a goal and road or pathway to the goal. So, I am also interested in how people use Twitter. A good set of numbers or metrics is always a good starting point for seeing what is possible and what is not.

Good reference site

I’ve discovered a blog that presents lots of numbers. A year old post on “types of Twitter users” is interesting.

The article begins with a 2×2 model beloved of management theorists. People with lots of followers and lots of updates are stars. People with lots of followers and few updates are influentials. People with lots of updates and few followers are bots. And finally, people who have few followers and few updates are lurkers. We all started there.

When I look at the scattergrams, I think this 2×2 is forced. It looks to me that there is a very strong correlation between activity and followers.

The more you talk, the more followers you have!

What does this mean for planning your usage?

Do you intend to get bigger and bigger? Do you have an intuitive sense of a good size for you?