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Anil Dash, tear down that wall

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Anill Dash ran a piece this evening about Twitter's Suggested User List.  

He gets that he didn't do anything to earn his placement on the list. He talks about washed-up actors who are on the list who use their follower numbers as supposed evidence that they still have pull with the people. SUL-celebs sell tweets for thousands a pop. A kid sold his SUL-enhanced feed to Microsoft. All this stuff makes you nauseous, and presumably it makes Anil ill too -- so why is he still on the list? 

Further, he says that Twitter will kill the list any day now, but doesn't address the fact that people who were on the list will be walking around with hundreds of thousands of unearned followers.  

Dan Bricklin says Anil is being a mensch, but that's ridiculous. You want to see a mensch. Let me show you a mensch. 

Om Malik is on the list so he has 1.2 million followers. I happened to notice this the other day while conversing with him on Twitter. I said what I felt, I was pissed at him for feeding at the trough that way. After a series of tweets I concluded that position on the SUL and links from TechMeme were both ways to keep people in line. Om, whose career could suffer for saying he agrees, said he agrees. In public, for everyone to see. That's a mensch. 

Anil Dash who is trying to build a career bridging the tech world and government cannot afford to appear to be in the pocket of a single tech company, yet that is exactly how it appears. And further, I know from talking with him that he understands this. Yet he remains on the list, and is keeping the account that got inflated.  

The only thing he can do that has any integrity, and allows his career to remain on track, is to not only ask to be removed from the list, but delete the account that got the benefit of being on the list and start over. There are no shortcuts possible here, imho.