WeFollow – the Echo Chamber Gets Louder

Digg founder and (so it would seem) tech heartthrob Kevin Rose has launched another service that looks set to set the world on fire. Kevin obviously ignored (or was too busy Twittering to hear) Tim O’Reilly’s recent plea to “build stuff that matters” and has instead developed WeFollow.

WeFollow is a service where by Twitter users (or simply interested others) can see a “User Powered Twitter Directory that rates Twitter users across a number of different verticals (tech, celebs, music etc) and, given the Valley ethos that bigger always equals better, lists them depending on the number of followers that user has.

In a fantastic piece of self-aggrandisement, Rose’s own Twitter persona comes top of the tech list with the insane number of 289,593 followers (at the time of writing). In yet another ironic twist, given his previously mentioned pleas for a more meaningful web, Tim O’Reilly only makes it in to number five with a third of the followers of Rose.

Now is it just me or have we witnessed the creation of a massively large echo chamber – where those with influence, gain more influence simply by some random success in the past? And to somewhat negate my last point, does anyone think the few million Twitter users are really that influential at an aggregate level? In a pool of six or so billion inhabitants of this planet?

Sure I use Twitter, I find it an excellent tool for gathering the collective wisdom (of admittedly a small microcosm of society) of staying in touch and of feeling connected – but using a tool, and buying into some gigantic land grab the point of which is entirely unknown, are two different things.

Yeah thanks Kevin, nice site and all but my advice is to go back to being a Silicon Valley poster boy.

On another, but related, note attendees at SXSW have finally realised that the value of Twitter comes, in part, by its lack of mass uptake. Once significant number of poeple start to use it the amunt of trraffic and “noise” generated makes it almost impossible to derive anything meaningful from even a targetted tag search. As they wrote over on GigaOm;

 tapping into thousands of people in real time through the web is just
as unwieldy as tapping into thousands of people real time via the
telephone or in person

I wonder what smart ideas Twitter have for when the noice just gets too much??? Maybe aTwitter will do for Twitter what aSmallworld is trying to do for Facebook.

UPDATE – A thoughtful review from RWW and hype continuation from Mashable