Once upon a time the concept behind the relationship between friends and strangers was reduced only in the possibility to have a direct or indirect link to someone.
For example a well connected guy had an agenda with the telephone numbers of people that he directly knew. That means that a physical contact and sharing some words was something obvious and the most basic element to get a phone number.
When internet invaded all aspects of our lives, the need to have a previously physical interaction with someone, in order to contact him or her, became secondary.

People started to interact using the email as the main communication medium realizing strong and real long term stable relationships. Eventually they would meet, but that wasn’t a must to consider each other contacts, or even good friends.

Before the social network revolution era, that means before Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and so forth; the concept of followers wasn’t common in the internet slang. For an average non-tech-geek guy, the concept of having followers only had a relationship with celebrities, politicians or religious figures.

Actually the concept of “followers” has a similar importance as the concept of “contacts in my agenda”. Followers in facebook, in twitter, friendfeed, Google Buzz and so forth create a halo of charisma that wasn’t ever achieved even with hundreds of telephone numbers or email addresses in an agenda. The concept of followers already extrapolated the world of the fame, politics, celebrities and religion to become a common term. It’s already something that everybody has.

Why followers are so important, even more than contacts, as an indicator of your human influence coefficient?

They are important because how we achieve a follower or a contact does matter. One thing is going to some event and present our business card to everybody hopping to collect as many business cards as we can, and another thing is being a content generator, a charisma hot spot, a human magnet that in some way results attractive to be followed.

Actually everybody potentially can be famous and followed. Everybody has the potential to have a huge influence over thousands of people. The fact that everybody has this potential will change things in the future, and I advice you to start thinking about these future changes.

It’s already happening. The more followers we have, the more social networks we participate in, the better to determine our possibilities to find, or not, a job. Not just a job, but a good one. It will determinate our potential to influence people, to change trends, to be a marketing tool. And the most interesting thing is: you can do it by creating content, being somebody worthily to follow. This simple concept has a collateral effect: Cultural Enrichment

The effort to provide something interesting, to provide new ideas, be intellectually useful and the possibility that everyone can achieve it, is a strong motivation factor that will positively affect the cultural level of our society.

Since the first time twitter announced the introduction of the retweet button, I was a little bit skeptic about it. The only rule Retweets have is to put “RT” before the original tweet. Beyond that there are amazing ways to personalize the RT function.

Anyway, the actual retweet button is far more complex than that and it keeps a useful track of retweets so I can have a list of basically “Retweets by others” , “Retweets by you” and “Your tweets, retweeted”

The only thing I really don’t like of the implemented retweet function is the way retweets are shown in the time line.

For example, I follow @tangerinejp and @Oren_The_Red and they follow me as well, but @Oren_The_Red doesn’t follows @tangerinejp So if I do a RT of @Oren_The_Red, the new retweet function puts the actual avatar of @Oren_The_Red into @tangerinejp’s timeline which is much better than a simple RT. I mean that it’s really good for @Oren_The_Red, because people will get attracted by a good avatar and eventually they will click on the user and follow him.

Now comes @jonnyli and he follows me and he follows @Oren_The_Red as well. In this case @jonnyli won’t see the retweet I did to @Oren_The_Red because he is already following him. But that’s not all; @Oren_The_Red won’t see that I retweeted him!! The only way for Oren to notice it is to go to the retweet records section and check who retweeted him.

RT has several implications from a social point of view. It’s not only a retransmission of information. It’s also a friendly way of showing the following:

1. Hey dude I’m not just following you, I’m really reading you.
2. I also love your tweet, it’s interesting and it’s worth retweeting it, it helps me putting good contents to my followers and it will help you to get promoted among my followers as well.
3. And I want you to notice it, just to see that I agree about what you say.

Well, all these social-human-information, get totally lost with the new retweet implementation. Of course @Oren_The_Red can check it but we are busy people and it’s preferable to have that information just in front of our time-line instead to search for it.

There is one more function, that has no relation with human feelings, as the previous ones, but it’s really important because it’s related with the nature of Internet itself.

We live in a big rock and only a certain percentage of my followers will read my tweets because the other ones are just sleeping, or they are busy with other stuff, or they cannot connect in that moment or whatever. So instead to worry about it and instead to try to find the perfect system to force our followers to read our tweets (and sometimes insistent people are really annoying me) just let’s the natural random behavior of my followers to RT me and remind the others what I said before, showing them what they also liked about what I said.

In this case, if I retweet @Oren_The_Red and @jonnyli was not aware of Oren’s tweets, maybe he will read the timeline in that very moment and notice @Oren_The_Red’s tweet thanks to my RT.

So I would love to see in my timeline when people that I follow get retweeted and when somebody retweet me. Just that, as the manual RT works.

By the way consider to follow: @tangerinejp, @Oren_The_Red and @jonnyli :-)

What do you think about the new retweet function?
Are you a traditional RTer or a new fashioned one?

I would like to continue with a comment I wrote in Paul’s blog about the fact that Twitter Japan is planning to charge for its service. Since the first moment everybody speculates about the future of twitter. Is it going to be profitable? how long will it survive? what is the real future of it? and so on.

The real value of twitter is based on its data. Millions of people write everyday thoughts, facts, links, ads, spam, replay to others conversations and so forth. Millions of people, from all over the world, using different languages, from different cultural backgrounds, speaking freely.
Now let’s imagine this. We have a web site, with a really simple form and a submit button. Saying:

Hi! Could you please tell me what you are thinking, what do you like and dislike? please share your links, share your thoughts, and do it several times per day and also please try to convince your friends to join. This is free, in fact we won’t pay you but you will pay us with information. We are a company and of course we have to produce money, and we will do it with your data, because we can sell that data and we can perform analysis on that data. So please, submit that info and we will give you back nothing. Just for free, isn’t it cool?

So after reading that… will you use that service? Of course not!!

So the idea is, let’s collect people’s data, and let’s do it in an spontaneous way, they will just submit everything they want. We don’t want to put restrictions because we also want to analyze human patterns and thousands of factors related to human behavior. Well we don’t want to learn how human being are just for biological or psychological reasons, we want to understand humans in a better way to be able to improve our clients marketing skills. Of course they won’t sell your private data, like your email, for example, in fact, who cares about your email or address or whatever? The important is: the language you speak, the colors you choose from the different layouts available, where you are and your shared thoughts!

So to make people do that let’s give them something back. Let’s provide a social network. That thing that is in vogue now with all that web2.0 “movement” so they will share their thoughts with us and at the same time we will give them some entertainment. We also let them promote themselves, so some people and companies can use our service as a marketing tool and share with us their strategies :) Well let’s help presidents and religious leaders as well, so we also collect that data.

Do you understand now where is the real value of twitter? Its data!

So for example, a company wants to launch a new product but they want to do some analysis first to try to make some prediction about the success of their possible future inversion. Let’s go and ask twitter. They can do the analysis for them or they can just sell some piece of raw data to be analyzed by themselves. The possibilities are infinite, the real value is that raw data to analyze and manipulate. That data has a radiography of the status of the world, it’s not only a marketing tool it could be used as a political or religion toll as well as a tool to understand actual tendencies.

There is a big difference between the data collected by twitter and the data that could be collected form the internet. Blogs, forums, web sites and so forth provide information about a specific topic. I had to stop many times and do some self reflexive thinking before I wrote this post because I want to transmit what I think in a proper way to make it understandable to everybody. This process is specially stronger when I’m not forced to do it in 140 characters. The common content that you can find in internet already passed through a meditation process that filter the spontaneity and focus on a specific target. Twitter is one of the most spontaneous social networks out there and that’s because we only have 140 characters; it’s not the number by itself but it’s the concept that we have a tiny space to write what we think so we can only think about thoughts, pills of information, ready and fast thinking that just pop-up in our minds and then we try to fit it in that space.

That is the real potential of all social networks, the data they collect and the analysis and results that could be achieved with that information. The ads in those networks only pay the electricity and the salary for engineers. The data they collect is the real value and of course the data generators, the data generation engine, that is users. But don’t misunderstand it. Users are important for two reasons, one is the data they generate and second their presence creates the excuse to convince other companies to pay to put ads that will generate the income to support the infrastructure. But all of this turn around a central core “data“.

I think that twitter Japan should be free, anyway it’s not the first time that Japan is used as an experimental platform. Let’s see if the data generated after and before the twitter-free age differ and change in value.