I've been on Twitter for a while now, running officially as Stranded Wind, and I've had a bunch of sock puppets. Some of those were message placement tools for campaigns and initiatives, some were long term, low intensity studies of how messages move in communities. That's an awfully academic description for trolling #tcot, isn't it?
Reputation Economics has advanced by leaps and bounds the last few weeks, both within Twitter and through third party applications.
A Twitter ID was initially assumed to be a human, most likely with a cell phone. There are a couple of other scenarios in which accounts get used – some are corporate presences, or role accounts, that behave much like a human owned account. There are automated and semi-automated message placement systems, that can run the gamut from teeth whitening spammers to valued public service announcements.
People also formerly used accounts as queries. An account would be created specifically for the sake of following a certain group of other users. This might have been done to limit noise in one's main account or to hide one's interest in a particular group of accounts. Twitter recently added a Lists feature, in which a user may create named lists of users, which has a couple of implications.
Being on a list can be insulting – I was on the Brain Dead Sick People list for a while, maintained by wingnut AmericanLady49, but I blocked her, which took me off the list. I relentlessly remove spammers and the worst of the wingnuts so the 49 lists I'm on are complimentary.
A list is a query that is 'following' one or more Twitter accounts and may itself be followed by zero or more Twitter accounts. Zero? Yup, some very organized users sort the people they follow. The list's value is based on the value of the users it's following and the value of the users that follow the list. I'm not sure how I got to be part of The Zombie Woof Crew but 428 members have attracted 34 followers. This is my biggest list exposure thus far. Being listed, particularly when the list itself has followers, is both a compliment and a bump to one's Twitter reputation.
How do you determine the 'value' or 'reputation' of a Twitter account. I've covered a couple of methods previously but the best of the breed seems to be Klout. They've been ranking users for a while with a complex set of metric which I covered a few weeks ago. They've recently extended this concept, rating both lists and hashtags.
The list ranking is really neat. Just take a look at the lists the Blog Workers Industrial Union maintains - Governor, House, and Senate incumbents and challengers from the Republican and Democratic parties. I think the incumbents are right here – only about 200 of the 538 Congress members are on Twitter. I know the challengers need some cleaning up, but resources for tracking them are pretty much non-existent. One of the BWIU members is working on that, but it's been slow going. We also see that there isn't universal uptake on Klout usage – one has to register, or be manually entered by a Klout employee. They've agreed to do that as soon as I send them a list, and I'm just waiting on a little better list of challengers before I do that.
So we're starting to see growing organization atop the following database of Tweets and as political activists the big questions are how this new method of human interaction can be used. Even campaigns with savvy new media managers are still stuck in the mindset that the Netroots are just a big, squishy ATM with a shifting set of controls leading to the jackpot. Donations are certainly part of the equation, but a distributed force of intelligent, motivated activists ought to be a lot more than a piggy bank to be shaken at irregular intervals. We'll be coming back to this point again in the near future ...