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Zero-price Markets in everything: "Fake following"
Jason Kottke reports:
This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates. That way, it appears that you're paying attention to them when you're really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity. Rex calls it "most important feature in the history of social networks" and I'm inclined to agree. It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 26, 2008 at 05:13 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Glad I'm more tech savvy than my advisor. The only problem is I must divulge a secret every now and then to stay valuable.
Back at the salt mine, I determined that the game was a competition to see who could pretend to be up to speed on the most stuff. The purpose of subordinates is to expand the sphere of intelligence gathering. This is another step in the arms race.
This is a benefit of academia. Everyone is so anti-social that, yes, they make you feel like crap, but at least they don't want to bug you. So, if you can handle long stretches of desertion, peppered with brief sessions of browbeating, academia is for you!
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 26, 2008 5:52:36 PM
LiveJournal and MySpace have had this feature for ages, they just didn't publicize it or call it that.
So the interesting thing to me is why FriendFeed thinks this is something to call attention to. Is it better to have unknown silent followers or to know that the popularity is fake?
Posted by: King Rat at Aug 26, 2008 6:12:36 PM
Better still would be to send only 1 in every N messages. Call it partial follow. Pick them randomly or randomly with a bias toward longer, more commented/replied or more clicked messages.
Posted by: Andrew Lacey at Aug 26, 2008 8:29:37 PM
A feature like that should also come with a way to signal honesty. Let users declare on their profiles that they haven’t enabled the option. Or if they have, let the world know that they may be fake followers. One group of people you can trust, another that’s a little more dubious.
Otherwise the existence of the feature imposes costs on all users, whether or not they use it. You could innocently miss a friend's update, but he'd have no way of knowing you aren't fake following him.
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