On 6/11/09 3:52 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
I think you may not be considering legitimate automated systems that can quickly find a number of people who are discussing n emerging topic. My social network analysis does that - when it sees a topic becoming hot, it does some searches to see who is talking about it. If the topic reaches a threshold of significance, the system's Twitter user will immediately follow all the people it has found who have recently talked about it. In reality, those are often people who it is already following, but as Twitter grows, it tends to include more and more new people. The system periodically un-follows people who no longer seem to be talking about hot topics.
Why must your system follow these individuals? If their timelines are public, you have no reason to follow them in order to pick up their updates. If their timelines are protected, how do you know to follow them in the first place, and this all assumes they'll grant you access to view their protected timeline, anyway.
As a human user, I can understand following making use easier. As a software agent user, there's no reason to actually follow anyone - you should be using the stream/follow or stream/shadow APIs, today.
-- Dossy Shiobara | do...@panoptic.com | http://dossy.org/ Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/ "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
