I read an interesting blog yesterday about identifying Malcolm Gladwell’s “connectors” and “mavens” within the website Twitter.com. It is pretty cool that Denis Hancock put these two concepts together to analyze someone’s social role in society based on their actions on a website. I thought about if twitter behavior REALLY is as good of an indicator as Gladwell’s last name test.
I have said in past posts that I do not believe Gladwell’s last name test (the list from The Tipping Point) is an accurate representation of social tendencies outside of the area the names were pooled from. Despite this, I think the concept of the test is the most accurate way to judge social behavior we currently have. Hancock tries to adapt Gladwell’s test of the 20th century to a medium of the 21st.
Hancock uses Gladwell’s titles of “connectors” and “mavens” for different users with high activity on their page, or users that contribute greatly to other users’ pages. I honestly have not used twitter before so terms like “Re-tweet” and “@ reply” are new to me but a Twitter Beginners Guide told me that a “re-tweet” is putting other users’ blog posts on your own page, as a way to get more attention on the original blog post. The “@ reply” I’m assuming is just publicly responding to comments left about your post.
This theory generally works: If you are a connector, you are outgoing and know many people. In Twitter, a connector is someone who reads many blogs, helping the original poster to reach out to more people, where a maven is someone who does not promote other users’ blogs, however they have a massive amount of people subscribed to their blog, so they have many more comments from other people.
I think that this would only be a good indicator of someones ONLINE social tendencies, because people act somewhat different on the internet. Someone who is shy when it comes to face-to-face conversations, may have a lot of interesting things to say on the web. Another problem I see in applying a user’s twitter behavior to their social behavior, is the fact that the term “friend” is used MUCH more loosely than in the outside world. You could know a classmate that has never said a word, but has 2000 Facebook friends, the more “pseudo-friends” you have, the more blogs you have access to, giving you the opportunity to share more blog posts from other people. So while Gladwell’s theories can analyze someone’s Online Social Behavior, I don’t think Twitter behavior has enough relation to Social Behavior to be plausible.