Home > Archive > 2009 > July > 7New rules for the SULTuesday, July 07, 2009 by Dave Winer.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.
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.
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. |
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