San Francisco pier 

Sarah Palin as Inspiration 

Every week on Rebooting The News, one of us chooses the Inspiration of the Week. Someone or something that inspires the RTN philosophy and process. Mostly they've been thinkers and doers, but Jay once surprised us with a great simple song, written by Nick Lowe and made popular by Elvis Costello.

One week Jay chooses, and the next week I choose.

I think I managed to surprise Jay yesterday when I chose Sarah Palin as the Inspiration for this week. You can hear the story at minute 35:45 in yesterday's podcast. Briefly I said she was a Source Going Direct, someone who was trying to tell a story through the press, but they weren't passing it along.

Jay wasn't buying it.

I admit it's a tenuous choice. She really should have a blog or podcast to qualify. But somehow the story made it to me, despite the best efforts of the press to hide it.

ABC News ran a story this morning with a quote that supports my theory. "She said a major factor in the decision was the mounting legal bills she and the state have had to incur to fight ethics charges from her political adversaries. None of the accusations has been proven but, she said, the costs of fighting them have been enormous."

What I noticed was this -- she had offered a plausible, reasonable explanation for her choice, and imho, it's the only one that makes sense. But none of the analysis I've read or heard until the ABC News piece even passed it on as a possibility. At a gut level, as much as I despise Palin as a politician, as a human with a story to tell, I sympathize. This is one of the times the press ought to be more of a mirror and not such a filter.

New rules for the SUL 

SUL stands for Suggested Users List.

I've written about it many times here on Scripting News.

I think it's finally time to say what I would advise Twitter, Inc to do to clean up the mess. Obviously they don't have to do any of this. But maybe it'll do some good to put the ideas out there anyway.

1. The max period anyone can be on the list is 30 days. Estimate how many followers each person currently on the list had been given, prorate it, and adjust it down to 30 days worth. So if on average, over the last few months, a member of the list would have gotten 100K new followers, but actually received 800K, he or she would lose 700K followers. It's still a gift of 100K followers, nothing to sneeze at. (And if it's true, as Tim O'Reilly says, that they don't matter, then losing some is nothing to complain about.)

2. It's possible that publications receiving the SUL bounty, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb, may have been witholding criticism of Twitter. They would now be free to express it. So there may be a bunch of bad press about this. Take the hit now while you're on top. Spin it as proof that unwinding the list was a good idea, because every company needs vibrant and unconflicted critics. Thank them for their feedback and take their advice to heart.

3. Sign a 180-day contract with Mr Tweet to manage the new SUL for $0. If they have a competitor, give them the next 180-day period. Allocate this on a rotating basis. It may be possible at some point for this contract to generate revenue for Twitter, Inc, as long as they keep the choice of people on the list an arm's length matter.

4. It may also be possible to do away with the list entirely, to suggest people to follow based on who they already know. Offer another route into the system, at the recommendation of an existing user. Then you have their network to base suggestions on. The incentives are lined up well for that, it encourages people to find new users and to have them encourage them to actually engage with the network. If the people you're following initially are friends, family members, neighbors, co-workers, the experience will mean more. Nothing wrong with following celebrities too, of course.

5. No more random selections for the SUL by TwitterCorp employees. This is a very bad practice for many reasons.

Jay and I discussed this in yesterday's Rebooting the News podcast. Clearly "real-time search" will require something like Page Rank in Google search, a way to determine the authority or relevance of a tweet or a link in a tweet. Microsoft has already encountered this issue when trying to develop real-time search in their Bing search engine.

While follower-count isn't perfect, it's the only metric we have anywhere in sight that might support relevance in search. Before the SUL it was actually working fairly well, but the SUL introduced a huge distortion. It may not be too late to unwind this and to solve the problem they were trying to solve without losing follower-count as a meaningful metric.