Twitter: Personalize == Destroy?

Disclosure: This question is very interesting to us. There's a tangle of delicious and intriguing subtleties here. This is one is a tough nut, with few promising solutions in sight. Even untangling why this is a problem is a challenge... The original post is well worth a read.

If you assign or calculate authority you're dis-empowering your grass roots audience. People tend to dis-like this. Alternatively, it might create an interesting game where good behavior gets you authority. Would you play?

clipped from venturebeat.com Please, please don’t personalize Twitter for me allows companies to share information about each other’s customers would empower them to deliver more serendipitous automatic content to these customers. The concept is called “discovery,” But it worries me to see Twitter CEO Biz Stone quoted and linked in the middle of Sherrets’ story, talking up plans to rank Twitter results by authority — by assigning different levels of importance to different users. That would, Stone says, float the “important” tweets to the top. Biz, that sounds like a great optional feature. But if you replace the current all-tweets-are-equal system with yet another Internet pecking order, you’ll ruin a big part of Twitter’s appeal to the masses, and to me. 1. Too much of the Internet is published by the same few people — We used to call them The 250 on Valleywag. 2. Twitter’s unranked content draws eager participants — People who aren’t already famous or important love Twitter