It is not how many but what you know about who follows you that matters
Allen Stern has a good video explaining why I got so many Friendfeed friends in such a short period of time. I actually posted yesterday I noticed I had 8438 followers on Twitter and 5160 on Friendfeed, a few hours before Michael noticed the same trend on TechCrunch. The answer is simple, my Friendfeed friends have placed me in the 9 people proposed by default to the new Friendfeed signups. They do not follow us by default, but they are offered to follow us by default. Here is how it looks like if you register a new Friendfeed account. I can only thank Paul and Bret for that of course, it cannot hurt...
Allen says he would like to see more diversity in these "by default" offered friends good idea I agree. I was focusing on the ratio of number of Friendfeed/Twitter friends when I posted about this, not to much on the numbers themselves.
My Friendfeed friends were fast to remind me that it is not the number of followers that matters but more who follows you or how deep is the relationship with them. Of course Robert also commented and said it is not who follows you that matters but who you follow. I follow about 8500 people on Twitter and to be honest, that makes my stream very unreadable.
With a high number of "friends" I feel the need to get to know them better, get more details on them and learn about them. This is one of the reasons why I launched Seesmic as you almost get to meet them with Seesmic. I would like to lean more about who follows me and why. This gives me tons of new ideas to create features on Seesmic.
Yes, I was trying to make a point with this post. I welcome anybody following me of course, but I feel bad about not being able to know more. I will work with Seesmic on how to solve this issue, at least some of that issue. Get to know more about your new "friends".
