One of the things I have been doing lately is checking out the lists of who the people I follow on Twitter follow. I am starting to see patterns which is of course to be expected.

There seems to be several kinds of people.

• Famous People -Those who follow a few and are followed by many.
• Followers -Those who follow many and are followed by few.
• Regular People - Those who follow and are followed by a similar number of people (ratio of followers to following is usually around 1.2 and 0.8).

Well sure there are outliers like Scoble and Kawasaki who are both followed by and following insane numbers of people but that sort of makes them less interesting in terms of understanding the bigger Twitter picture. (Yeah they are interesting and I follow both of them but I want to look at something different here.)

The people who are followed by many but follow few themselves are “famous” if I can use the term somewhat loosely. By that I mean that they have a reputation in their online community that often far exceeds their local real life community. Their neighbors may not even know they have any fame at all but when they show up at a conference or similar event they attract a crowd. They get quoted as authorities in other blogs and in conversations. Reporters (main stream media ones) talk to them, call them up, and quote them. They tend to follow other famous people more than “regular people” or “followers.” That’s fine as far as it goes but I wonder about echo chamber problems and losing touch with regular people. But clearly these people are hubs of a sort and something that is interesting can quickly spread to many people. That makes them even more valuable which leads to more followers.

Followers are people I don’t quite understand. They follow many people but somehow never generate the interest to attract many followers of their own. So what is the point? Is it all about taking in lots of information? That seems a reasonable goal I guess. It’s just not for everyone though. Anyone have an explanation for that phenomenon?

Regular people do not have time to follow lots and lots of people. They follow their friends, colleagues, peers and yes, fairly often, some famous people. It seems to be partly about following the news (from the famous) but even more largely about sharing with peers. I think all of Twitter is largely about sharing with peers of course. But for the regular people I think there is more use of the reply and direct message to a larger set of people. Famous people reply to their followers but regular people carry on conversations with their friends in a less formal way.

Yes I know that famous people hold conversations with their friends, who are usually other famous people. These conversations are often part of the reason people follow them but conversations between regular people seem to be more personal.

I have been looking at a bunch of people lately and wondering who among the people they follow I should also follow. If a lot of the really interesting people are following someone should I also follow them? Or should I keep my traffic down and assume that somehow the interesting thing from those people will show up in the people I already follow? So far I am adding people very slowly. I’m sure I am missing a lot of interesting people but there is only so much time in the day. And I’m reading too many blogs so until I cut back there I don’t have a lot of time to follow many more on Twitter.