“Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter’s suggested friend list. They sure were not more popular than @leolaporte two weeks ago.” – Robert Scoble
Well, first. When you pull a ridiculous accusation out of your ass, I do believe that the burden of proof is on you. The issue here is that Robert Scoble has become increasingly more and more irrelevant as the whole free-money Web 2.0 “social networks as conversations” thing began to wane and he can’t handle that. For some inexpicable reason, there are a small few that actually do listen to him and we end up with gems like this.
Twitter has a feature called “Suggested Users” so people can find new interesting people to follow. It’s not really based on any true metric or algorithm as far as I can see and thus, it’s not a popularity contest in the way that Scoble would like things to be. Thus, he feels the need to accuse Michael Arrington of ‘bribing’ a Twitter founder to be on that list. Other people on the list are Veronica Belmont, Felicia Day, Kevin Rose and other assorted popular users. The problem here is that Scoble and others feel that every social network has to be open and trasparent so that “thought leaders” (and I mean that as a pejorative) can quantify their excellence through popularity and notoriety.
Robert Scoble is angry and whining because of the fact that he’s not on it. That’s all. He’s angry that nobody actually cares about what he has to say except desperate start-up owners looking for him to schill their product. Scoble has an always will be an attention grubing blogger who, much like Dave Winer, have completely lost sight of the revolutionary environment they were thought to be fostering in the early days of Web 2.0.
The quote link leads to a thread on FriendFeed which is an interesting read for the sheer ridiculousness of it all.