Over The Counter Culture» Blog Archive » An apology

An apology – Facebook frienders

Hi guys – if anyone has added me as a friend on Facebook recently but I’ve ignored the request it’s because I’m doing my best to keep Facebook for my friends only – people whose updates I know for certain I am interested in seeing pepper my minifeed.

Please do not take this personally – in fact, it’s precisely because our relationship is impersonal. Facebook is the one service whose value gets diluted if I’m indiscriminate in establishing communication pathways with random people. But I warmly invite you to connect to me on a great number of other wired services – you wouldn’t be diluting them at all, you’d be enriching them.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Lifestream. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Philippe Bradley

edit: I'd like to do that, I'm waiting to see how the data trends over the next few days, to show the spike and tail. OK to wait?

ES

I'd be interested to see the number of visits for OTCC during the days prior to and after Fred's plug--to see the "power of Fred" if you will.

Philippe Bradley

make sure you don't miss an important point about this effect - it's not a torrent of traffic, like Slashdot, Digg or Yahoo Buzz would send your way. But it was heat-seeking, laser-guided, ultra-relevant traffic - traffic to my About page went up loads. These were people who wanted to find out who I was, what I thought, what value I could be to them, what value they could be to me, what thoughts and views and ideas we could exchange.

For anyone that doesn't give two shits about # of visits (i.e. your site doesn't operate CPM ads), response rate or number of new connects formed - i.e. graph 3 - is the most important metric of the value of "FW effect" traffic.

Philippe Bradley

Here you go! http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/socia...
the 'Fred Wilson Effect' (though I've framed it as the benefits of open conversation, you're right that FW's high profile was in all likelihood a very important factor; and that informs a thesis I'd like to discuss later, about the benefits of hosting a minor, personal blog like this, vs. using an aggregated comment platform like Disqus, as 'podium' for self-expression and building a digital identity