Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts

BFF means “best friends forever” for those of you who are wondering why there’s a monkey and banana at the top of this blog post

Examining the power of one-way friending AKA “follow”
When I first joined Twitter, I found the one-way following mechanic pretty weird – but now, it’s clear that it’s very powerful and provides a richness that you can’t get from two-way friend requests. Initially though, I was confused. After all, hadn’t all social networks standardized around two-way friend requests that both parties have to accept? Why try to fix it? It seemed like it’d just be confusing, and potentially freak some people out that they were being followed by random people they didn’t know.

This post examines the strengths of the one-way “follow” design, in particular, the ability for this paradigm to support 4-tiers of relationships rather than the simple 2-tiered model in the classic friends case.

First, let’s discuss the social groupings issue.

Social groupings and friend segmentation
At the same time as Twitter was just getting started, the rapid explosion of users on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks raised a bunch of really core and important questions about these social applications. Among these issues:

Will one social network rule them all?
Or alternatively, will you use one social network for work, one for your personal life, and possibly others for other vertical interests?
If it’ll be one, how will you group your work friends in one, and your personal friends in another?
How will this work at a design level? How about at a technical level? (aka Data Portability?)

These are all great questions, and point out a number of potentially fundamental weaknesses to the all-in-one social networking model. If you look at many other communication channels, like phone, email, etc., you’ll often see people segment their identities. Their work voicemail will be boring, and their personal voicemail will be funny, and they’ll use different phone numbers for each.

Of course, the initial petri dish that social networks grow – high school and college students – don’t really have to deal with this. Their social groupings are more or less homogenous, because they only have personal friends. But after you’ve worked a couple places, moved around, and have your friends’ careers diverge into lawyers and slackers, then your social network becomes more complex and segmented.

The approach that many social networks have taken to solve this is to group people into networks and friend lists. Either through self-assignment or you assigning them, people go into different lists. Of course this hurdle is basically a type of boring security configuration that consumers have historically had trouble with.

Twitter’s “follow” model
The amazing thing about Twitter’s model of allowing one-way following is that it adds depth and a couple simple segmentations to your friend list, without needing to do any configuration beyond hitting a button.

With the one-way follow design, you have:

People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
You both follow each other (Friends!)
Neither of you follow each other

Having these 4-tiers of relationships on Twitter is nice – combined with Protected Updates, it creates a nuanced set of definitions, executed with just one button: Follow.

The advantages are numerous: First, it’s easier to get started by opting into a number of feeds that pre-exist, and you can populate your timeline without anyone accepting your friend requests. Second, it makes it possible to have interactions with lots of people (@replies), but your timeline only has information you care about, as you don’t have to follow folks you’re not interested in. Third, some profiles are inherently appealing to a cross-section of users – these include celebrities, companies, media content, etc. – and it the one-way follow design supports all of these nicely whereas two-way friending makes things complex.

Two-way friending with public profiles?
Compare the above to the traditional two-way friending case, supported by social networks

You’re friends
You’re not friends

So how do you deal with Sean Combs aka P. Diddy (aka @iamdiddy)? If you were to friend him (and he friends you back), all of a sudden, you are exposed to the random people (like you) who are interacting with him, which creates a lot of low-value information on your newsfeed.

As a result, it only makes sense to separate Diddy’s profile into two separate ones, a public and private profile, where the private is the “real” friends and the public one is everyone else. For MySpace, they opted to differentiate these public profiles as “Artist Profiles” whereas Facebook decided to call them “Pages.” I imagine that they treat information flowing in and out of these pages specially, so that they know not to public crazy amounts of information from random people, and they can segment those interactions out.

Note that MySpace was very early in having these celebrity profiles, which has led to the right of so-called MySpace celebs like Tila Tequila, Forbidden, etc. whereas I’m not aware of any Facebook celebs emerging ;-)

Maybe this two-way friends with public/private profiles works, but it’s much less elegant than a single “follow” button. In the dual profile version, you end up needing either lots of configuration (what photos to publish, which friends belong in which), or you end up with two distinct pieces of content. This would mean multiple photos, multiple profile content, and two places to do everything. Not attractive, in my opinion.

Conclusion
Ultimately, both approaches have their advantages – the two-way friending model is better at supporting strictly real-life relationships. That ability has obviously led MySpace and Facebook to conquer a lot of real estate and build eyeballs. At the same time, this model requires them to design around the complexity introduced by celebrities, brands, and companies, which are all important folks to have in your ecosystem for long-term monetization as well as mass appeal.

As always, leave a comment with your thoughts! See any other friending models that have advantages?

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AndySmith

A very cogent analysis, Andrew. I agree that Twitter's unique follow model avoids the negativity of a MySpace / Facebook friend request getting missed, ignored or turned down. Different people have different thresholds they apply to “friend” status and it can make for awkwardness when people meet once and one later tries to friend the other on FB if the recipient has a higher friending threshold. Twitter's default to tweets bering public unless someone specifically decides otherwise makes for a medium more suited to news and discovery, while FB is better suited for re-connection and keeping in touch. Getting followed back on Twitter is a bonus, not a requirement for a dialogue.
http://www.cindyalvarez.com cindyalvarez

Despite the reputation that Twitter has as “a bunch of people tweeting what they had for breakfast”, I think that the one-sided follow model *encourages* quality.

In a dual-accept friend model, there is both more context (you know if they have a penchant for sarcasm or deliver jokes with accompanying funny voices, etc.) and a certain relaxing of standards (you like them, so you don't hold their fondness for embarrassingly bad movies against them). With a public timeline and anyone-can-follow, you can't count on having ANY context – each tweet must stand alone and provide value.
https://slashdot.org/~stoolpigeon/ stoolpigeon

It does work well, I wouldn't necessarily call it the Twitter model though. This is the way it has worked on slashdot for years.
http://www.Olivosartstudio.blogspot.com Claudia Olivos

Nice analysis!
I have joined twitter with the interest in having some type of 'dialogue' even if only two words, with people I would otherwise never have met. I follow only a few people who don't follow me for this reason-I am interested in the actual interaction.
Additionally, I have organized my social networking somewhat so that my Facebook page is strictly for family and friends, we have an artist group on facebook open to the public to share our artwork and updates- and Flickr is also available publicly and ties into our blog.
I will participate with interest with Twitter eager to see what it will bring to our lives as artists.
http://littlewinery.blogspot.com Tim Beauchamp

What you described as the difference in the twitter model from the facebook model, not requiring reciprocity of friends or followers, it what makes twitter so much better in exchanging information. Just because a person chooses to follow another's postings does not mean that the reciprocal is true. Just because I find what you say interesting, doesn't mean you are interested in what I have to say.

This more closely represents information between people in other social or media interactions. I don't expect that John Stewart is interested in my conversations, but I sure enjoy listening to him on the Daily Show.

Very good piece. Thanks for your insight.

@tbeauchamp
http://blog.indiscriminator.com Mark Norman

This is the same as delicious.com. Your “network” is all the people you are “following”; they have different logos for whether the relationship is mutual. Similarly you have “fans” who can also be mutual or not.

Delicious also has the ability to tag a bookmark with a “for:” prefix, rather like the @ operator.

If delicious had added the ability to simply post a message as well as a bookmark, and SMS integration, they'd have had twitter built already. Oh well.

On the other hand, they've built what they do very well by focusing on the one thing and making it as convenient as possible with RSS feeds etc. Their mobile support is the one thing I would like to have seen done better.

Next: an easy way to drop URLs from one's twitter feed into a separate tag on delicious?
http://www.keepingyouhonest.net Lee Lowder

I would have to say that there are a few more tiers available with Twitter's one way follow.

In addition to the list above, there are a group of people that I get device updates for. I would have to say that the people that have mutual device updates and following are your friends, as a lot of the “celebrity” or news type twitter feeds will follow whoever follows them, which doesn't really imply friendship.
Matt Young

Take a look at http://www.tweetizen.com/ – i think they do a damn good job grouping friends.
kareem

nice analysis, andrew, though it strikes me that twitter's “follow” model is based on flickr's (which doesn't require two-way acceptance to get updates).
http://www.jooners.com nazila alasti

Hi Andrew, interesting observations on grouping.
There is another category of people that we spend time interacting with that are neither Friends nor Followers. They are people that become important for a specific reason, for a certain period of time as part of our transient groups. We spend over 80% of our lives in these transient circles. Say you are collaborating on an event/preso for a conference with a PR person for couple of weeks. Or a student has a TA for a particular course. Or a school auction chair is working with committee chairs for a couple of months. All examples of transient groups, with interactions (emails, calls, updates on FB) that will be intense only (or mostly) for the duration of the interaction. Post interaction, there will be no sign of these people on my feeds, or my email inbox, nor on the list of calls made from my cell phone.

These people are neither friends nor followers and there is really no good way of “un-earthing” them. Except if you create “containers” for these transient relationships and and let them live and die within the time period. That is what we are trying to do at jooners. I'd love to know if you have come across any data on these type of groupings on any transient groups.
jrep

You neglected to mention the most under-understood feature of Twitter: you can choose whether to see @replies (by people you follow) only to others you follow, or everyone. This would be a bit help with the “celebrity profile” situation, except that Twitter makes it a personal settings (all your follows), rather than a per-follow one.
Andrew

Yes, these transient social groupings are super interesting. It seems like the “hashtags” functionality in Twitter, like #sxsw or the “groups” feature of Facebook serve that in an OK way, but you're right that it's not supported very explicitly. Great observation.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

Yes, these transient social groupings are super interesting. It seems like the “hashtags” functionality in Twitter, like #sxsw or the “groups” feature of Facebook serve that in an OK way, but you're right that it's not supported very explicitly. Great observation.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

I get a lot of people sending me friend requests on Facebook after reading my blog or seeing me at a conference, and unfortunately I have to turn them down. I don't want to show them my photos and see their info in my newsfeed, and these interactions just aren't supported well. Same for Linkedin and other two-way networks.

On Twitter, on the other hand, I think it's great to have people follow me – and I often follow back, if they are posting a lot of interesting content. It's very nice to have this kind of interaction.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

We can call it the slashdot model then ;-)
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

That's right, device updates is another tier. It's almost like there's the 4 tiers from the follow action, crossed with device versus public versus protected updates. That's a lot of use cases.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

Yeah, I think ultimately it's based on the idea of “subscribing” to each others' micro-blogs, but since your blog is so closely tied to an external persona, it only makes sense to use a person-to-person word like follow rather than a content-to-person word like subscribe.
Peggy Dolane

If someone invents one application where I can post public and private updates and converse with a broad range of people outside of my network, please let me know. Until then, I'm cobbling together a twitter and facebook community.
http://www.jooners.com nazila alasti

Hashtags are too large/public. FB groups buried and limited. I'd love to chat in person.
You have my email.
http://informationized.com phillipbaker

Right on! But, I think 'follow' can become much more powerful than 'subscribe' for exactly that reason. After all, social media is about people and following a person is more meaningful than following their content. I know this post was about Twitter specifically but I think 'follow' is bigger than Twitter and you've hit upon it here. The difference between 'subscribe' and 'follow' seems academic on the surface – you get their updates either way. But, once you start to aggregate a person's social media content and add additional social gestures like 'retweet', 'reblog', or 'like' you're getting a lot more than a feed of content. You're seeing how that person felt about something they saw and what they deemed important enough to republish in their feed to other people, you're getting more of that person in their feed of content. It's more expressive, people are sharing their external persona (or reputation) because it's inherently transmitted with every social gesture. And 'follow', as well as transmitting something about you by showing others who you're following, turbocharges the whole process because it doesn't require reciprocal relationships.
http://www.twitter.com/altepper Al

I think this raises some valid points about the nuances found in relationships at different social layers. I think overall though the filtering takes place at the point of connection (twitter follower model) or post that point (the facebook tiered privacy model).

Both have their strengths but actually the Facebook model has more long-term traction as it allows for greater levels of nuance and hence more social strata, which is much more akin to real life of course.

Twitter has four but as with the lunatic in 'There's Something About Mary' it won't be long before someone invents the 7 second abs programme, or in this case, the four + model.

Facebook is already there with its nuanced capacity for segmentation. My own problems however with Facebook are a lack of a decent mature interface imho and the ability to @ & RT to people I am not connected to.

Tweetdeck's recent expansion to include Facebook addresses my first problem. Only Facebook can address problem 2. Not sure they can, but am sure they will give it a good do and it will make for an interesting 2009.

Three thoughts:
Thought 1: If Facebook allows for @ & RT broadcasting to anyone a la twitter then that might negate twitter for me/some/many

Thought 2: Tweetdeck has no loyalty to Twitter and Facebook lets it play in a much bigger app universe

Thought 3: Tweetdeck as Facebook interface is way more appealing to me than Facebook itself
http://twitter.com/davdin davdin

I also thought about Flickr when reading this post.
Flickr gives the publisher of the content the ability to “promote” a follower/subscriber to a higher level of access to content that is protected from public but available to friends or family. I think it works well for flickr but I wonder, would that work for twitter? After all, what made twitter so popular is the ease of use and a feature like that might be just too difficult for most of users to bother with it.
http://informationized.com phillipbaker

Another interesting point is that the initial barrier to 'following' people is actually higher than 'subscribing' to an RSS feed. In order to follow someone on Twitter, you need to have a Twitter account and the same goes for other services with 'follow'. Whereas, you can go around the Web and hit up as many RSS feeds as you like using a single reader account.

However, once you have a Twitter account you can follow people with one click and without the page even reloading. At that point it's actually easier than subscribing to an RSS feed.

RSS subscriptions bring all the content you want into your own private room where you can read it in private. Follow puts you in the same room(s) as the people you're following and that follow you. It brings people closer together.
soozee

Andrew, this is a thought provoking article. I'm a mainstream non geek user who just began using twitter 4 days ago and I was definitely freaked out that strangers were following me and I assumed i was expected to follow them. I know in time I'll connect with many of them, but right now it seems like there are lot's of random people marketing and advertising like crazy and there's not a whole lot of dialogue going on. When I look at my timeline, it's like watching one long commercial for stuff I'm not that interested in. Maybe I don't get it yet, but I'll keep practicing. As of today I still prefer Facebook.
http://www.qlubb.com Qlubb-Andy

A nice offshoot of the model is that people like to have lots of followers. Whether it be for vanity or because it's critical to their business there's a natural recruitment process that causes the number of users to spread like wildfire. For Twitter this means they don't need to spend lots (or any) of money marketing to get 1000+% growth. Facebook has a natural limit — I would guess most people will have fewer than 150 friends/acquaintances. Having segments 1,2,3 represent a much broader set of connections than Facebooks #3. Perhaps Facebook owns the profile, but Twitter just might own the conversations.
http://therestlessmind.wordpress.com mark2one

Great topic Andrew.

As with all decisions, form should follow function. Twitter is an open system, ergo non-reciprocal feeds work well. FB was designed for closed groups, so reciprocity is at the heart of FoaF. Both can be ruined, though: accept too many non-friends in FB; always follow followers in Twitter.

(Flickr is a good case study of “inbetween.” Caterina and Stewart started with the notion of “attention isn't always reciprocal,” but then added contact granularity to enable item-specific privacy (Contacts/Family/Friends). Again, this is appropriate for a system that is specifically focused on publishing one-item-at-a-time (the photo), whereas Twitter simply lets you protect the entire feed (since no one is going to tag each tweet for privacy).

As Andy Smith notes below, the result of FB and Twitter's design makes them wholly appropriate for very unique tasks—another reason one won't replace the other.
http://www.philomathgames.com Erin

As others have somewhat gotten to above, this is by no means a twitter innovation. Twitter has innovated, but the “follow” mechanic goes back further to other pre-Facebook social networks. Livejournal, for instance, has used this two-way friending mechanic since its inception in 1999 — 10 years is a very long time in internet history. Social online media is just reaching mainstream awareness, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a history. I think it's important to be aware of things like this so as to be able to accurately separate and analyze the ways in which products like twitter DO innovate.
http://www.twitter.com/snverhallen Sean Verhallen

Great article but there is one thing I don't understand.

You say that if I, for example, follow Diddy that I would be subjectbto all the the random people interacting with him but wouldn't you just recieve tweets from Diddy. You would only recieve tweets from others interacting with him if you followed them individually. I may be wrong, please correct me if I am.

Again, great article!
http://www.mattrobin.com Matt Robin

Twitter's Elegant design for grouping contacts eh?…. ;)

Sorry, what's elegant about the absence of any multiple grouping options? This doesn't highlight design, this smacks of laziness on Twitter's part to develop more! It just isn't their intention to provide that feature.

There are two errors in your article too that need to be addressed:

1) Twitter has three-tiers of relationships, not four, ….'Neither of you follow each other' is not a relationship at all! ;)

2) You've over-looked (maybe by accident) that Facebook's user security settings allow for almost limitless grouping options – you could make a different access level for co-workers, friends, people who you hardly know, family, etc.
Twitter's 'elegant' solution fails to do any of this.

There are some advantages for both approaches, but when it comes to 'grouping contacts' (the title of your article), Twitter is plainly inadequate in its present form.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

At least on the original facebook newsfeed, if your friends interacted with random people, you would often see wall posts and such related to them. I'm not sure of the exact rules, and it may have been that your friend has to initiate an action to show up, but either way, you saw some friends of friends that way.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

re: #1, you're a nitpick ;-)

Also, I do address #2, in one of the first paragraphs – my contention is that no one cares about these security-esque features because they are too complex:

“The approach that many social networks have taken to solve this is to group people into networks and friend lists. Either through self-assignment or you assigning them, people go into different lists. Of course this hurdle is basically a type of boring security configuration that consumers have historically had trouble with.”
http://www.mattrobin.com Matt Robin

Thanks for the reply Andrew. Yes, I can be a nitpick sometimes! Hehe!

With the second point though, (thanks also for drawing added emphasis to your particular sentence – good point), the title of the article itself is a bit misleading: 'Twitter's elegant design for grouping contacts' – here, in this article, I thought you'd expose some way that Twitter actually groups contacts (that I might not have been aware of). Having just three possible relationship tiers in the (Twitter) application is not a specific attempt at grouping contacts at all.

Comparing Twitter's lack of a feature to the grouping features of other apps (e.g. Facebook) is a total mismatch. One app doesn't have grouping features and the other does.

Are you saying Twitter's absence of a feature is an elegant solution?! ;)

That's almost like saying a 4-seater people carrier with NO side-sliding doors is a 'more elegant solution' than a 7-seater people carrier WITH side-sliding doors! :D

I think Twitter is good for what it's designed for and used in a simple way (with low expectations), while a Social Networking site, like Facebook, can't be directly compared because it's trying to do so many other functions.
Suggesting Twitter has a way of grouping contacts at the moment is a bit far-fetched.

Aside: Facebook's security settings can't be that complex Andrew (I mean, hey: if I can work them out, they can't be that confusing! Haha!) ;)

If anything, the more people use social media, the more relevant it will be to have some (sense) of control over what is being shown…and to who! So, YES, people will care about the '….security-esque features'.
I suspect Twitter's build is flexible enough to incorporate such features later if the need becomes sufficient. For now though, it's just not there.
eas

But for a lot of people, the social part of slashdot was pretty tacked on. Livejournal on the other, like Twitter, was about communication and self expression, and they had the Twitter model.

In any case, I appreciate your post, and it couldn't be better timed. We've just been discussing this sort of thing for a product we are working on.
http://seancomalley.com seanomalley

One of the original two-way friend networks was instant messaging. You might recall that the design was a bit more nuanced than you've outlined. In the case of IM:

1. You’re friends
2. You’re not friends
3. You're friends (but you appear always offline)

One of the reasons #3 was developed was for those cases where you wanted to accept someones invite (so as not to insult them) but you really didn't want to talk to them.

In the end, i think both 1-way and 2-way follow models have their place but what is clear is that 1-way follow models have less friction involved and thus drive more connections. Is that a good thing? Sometimes;)
Leland

Excellent excellent ideas and post Al. Really you are completely correct. Facebook need only slightly expand it's broadcast system and twitter may have some serious difficulties.

Our company is working on a blog oriented plugin/widget/application right now that will include some social elements similar to what facebook and twitter are currently using. I would love to get your opinions and thoughts about our current social system but i'm not sure how to initiate a dialog with you. :)
http://www.leadsexplorer.com Engago Team

Friends or followers:
9 Methods to increase your relationship with your online relations for lead generation or sales http://bit.ly/unX0
idontlikewords

Late to the party here, but I just referenced this post in a discussion of Facebook's massive butchering of a similar issue, re: how to manage status updates among friends, followers & “business” entities:

http://www.antinomian.com/2009/04/03/wtfacebook/
faisalmajeed

The Completely Automated Twitter Growth & Money Making System for People That Want to Set Up A System ONCE, Forget About It, and Have it Grow and Make Money EVERY Day!
http://875f81xab56p9w8aqfx7183x0f.hop.clickbank…
http://www.wof.fi/ wof

most of our followers are trying to get more followers for themself and only friends are actually following our stream. http://twitter.com/wof_fi
BS

Though I understand the many benefits of anyone being able to follow one's tweets, I'm not really a fan.

I have very different “lives” that don't overlap and which I don't WANT to overlap. I don't need professional contacts knowing what I'm doing with my family or in my spare time; my family and friends and work colleagues don't need to know the esoteric conversations I have regarding hobbies I may have like sci-fi TV.

BUT, if I had to email a work contact from my personal email address at some point and they search their address book for potential Twitterers, I now have a professional contact – perhaps someone I hope to work for or work with – reading all the minutia of my personal life.

I don't like it at all and while I was hoping that an app like Tweetdeck would allow me to group and segregate my followers, in fact it only allows me to segregate those that I follow. And now that I have people from all walks of my life, tuning into my tweets, I can't interact on any level, with anyone, the way I'd LIKE to.

So, nope, not a fan of current paradigm. Barring creating 3 or 4 separate twitter accounts, there isn't a way to do this AND there is no app that I'm aware of that would allow me to manage multiple twitter accounts. If there is – PLEASE tell me!!
http://www.socialbeta.cn/ puting

thank you for sharing.i wish i could translate it into Chinese.
juanpollo

it sucks balls
Mike

where's this photo from?
http://www.easyrecovery.ie/ Data Recovery

Clearly, writing retreat is good for you. But too, it is good for us readers
http://www.easyrecovery.ie/ Data Recovery

This is a sketch.
http://twitter.com/shatech155 shadeira

sad i want celebs 2 follow me
http://twitter.com/shatech155 shadeira

sad i want celebs 2 follow me

@andrewchen