The topic of the weekend is Loic LeMeur’s call for “search by authority” which people like or dislike. Arrington today put this down as a simple feature request, namely being able to sort twitter search-results by number of followers/following/# of tweets. I think most people have no trouble with the latter, but are hung up on calling this “authority”.
I agree for once with Robert Scoble that the metric is highly game-able. However, even if not, I wouldn’t all a mix of “followers/following/# of tweets” authority: The beauty of twitter is that there is a bunch of data out there, but the usage you derive from it is completely up to your behaviour.
Whom you follow, what do you track, how do you tweet. Not without thinking people have decided to have groups with tweets by @arrington, @jowyang, @scobleizer and @stevegillmor in one subset, another with @wayne_gretzky, @eklund and @thehockeycardshow. A CEO might have a lot to say, but only choose to follow @dbfarber, @rands, @cc_chapman and @stevepavlina. Where does that put his authority? In my view this contradicts the notion that it is not important how many readers a blog has, but who reads it.
Sure, a search results page with the “followers/following/# of tweets” would help you get a first impression. But does that help you? Lately, many people have added me who have loads of followers. But I have never heard of them. That is not a bad thing, but there is no trust based on numbers, and to me, authority has something to do with trust!