Your attention is worth USD .34 and for sale

posted 05:41PM Apr 13, 2008 with tags attention ebay socialnetworking twitter by Lars Trieloff

Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom is selling his Twitter account on eBay. With the current bid of 510 USD, each of his 1481 followers is worth .34 USD to the buyer. That is little more than you would pay for a click in Google Ads, which bears some interesting implications for everbody interested in monetizing Twitter attention at a large scale (e.g. Twitter). So if you would find a way of grabbing the attention of all twitter users (TwitDir tracks almost a million twitter users), this collective attention would be worth 330435 USD, which is much less than the 21 million valuation estimated by Techcrunch.

Turning the calculation around, and taking this 21.88 USD per user valuation, however Andrew Baron's account would be worth 32411 USD.

Levels of social networking

posted 07:17PM Nov 03, 2007 with tags delicious digg dopplr facebook flickr friends lastfm linkedin plaxo plazes socialnetworks twitter web20 xing by Lars Trieloff

Believe it or not, for more than one year I have an article draft saved in my weblog system, titled "Social Software". The original reason for writing this was that Dan Diephouse wrote about O'Reilly's Connection, a now defunct social network for geeks. Some days ago Brett Porter wrote about his experiences with social networks, and I decided to start over with this blog post.

Being user of some social networks of different flavors, I noted that the number of connections I have in different network differs strongly. One reason is that some network have a larger user base, others make it very hard to add connections, others imply a closeness of relationships that I do not want to share with everyone. So, what level of social relationships does being connected in one network imply?

Facebook
Nothing. It basically means "Hey you are on facebook as well!"
Xing, Plaxo Pulse and LinkedIn
You might be useful for my career, I better keep you in this network.
twitter, Last.fm, Flickr
What you do (listen to, or photograph) is interesting for me
del.icio.us and Digg
What you read and think is interesting for me
Dopplr and Plazes
If you happen to be in the same place with me, it would be nice to know so we can meet.

The most valuable network for me (apart from the address book synch of Plaxo) is del.icio.us, because it allows me to track and share ideas with people I find interesting and this is despite the poor network capabilities of del.icio.us. So if you would like to connect with me in del.icio.us, just leave a comment with your username,