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With James as my inspiration, I have been thinking more about asymmetric follow and how it applies to the web. I decided to make up some simple pictures to describe my thoughts on it.

Movie and music stars are really the definition of asymmetric follow. You buy their records, watch their movies, send in fan mail but you will probably never be acknowledged by the star nor will what you have communicated probably even be read by them or impact them. All follow no follow back. Purely asymmetrical. The stars don’t follow anyone else and everyone follows them. The number of people involved in these systems is very large - i.e. one star might have millions of fans.

Radio also has a huge audience and most people just sit there and listen so the right side is pretty high again. On the other hand some shows do allow people to call in or often talk to notable people in the field so there is, though relatively small, some follow back going on.

Email of course has become an important communication medium. With email you can receive it from anyone from close family or peers to random people and spammers. This picture I am least confident about but certainly some people get lots of unsolicited email while also having many people that they would consider to be “following”.

Finally, we have Twitter or other Web 2.0 social networks (like dopplr that James posted data from) where “friending” is not reciprocal by design. With things like Twitter we are approaching something symmetrical despite the fact that reciprocity is not enforced and I think there are few reasons for this that JP also touched on. The main idea being that Twitter reduces the barrier for people to engage in conversations.

Twitter actually increases the symmetry of traditional asymmetrical follow primarily by the fact that it is a smaller community than pop-culture at large and therefore the signal to noise ratio is considerably higher in general. This is helped further by the fact that interactions have to, by design, be succinct. At 140 characters there is only so much you can say and it is easier for other people to comprehend. Twitter is also very temporal in that if you are not around to get them you are generally fine to ignore them unless they are replies or direct messages. Finally, Twitter is public which helps to keep people and their conversations honest.

Asymmetrical follow is clearly a prominent pattern across all media, and maybe something that is being reduced through tools like Twitter, are there other patterns that while prominant in more traditional forms of media are somehow reduced in a Web 2.0 world?

Tags: asymmetric follow, Patterns, web 2.0.