Robert Scoble

Some of those high profile members would include Robert Scoble and other digital age celebrities. Scoble’s Twitter account shows he follows nearly 85,000 people, which one supposes is like always eavesdropping on a random sample of comments emanating from a Rolling Stones concert.

(One also imagines that in the next installment of the “Bruce Almighty” series, whoever gets to be God for a while has his mobile blown up by realtime tweeted prayers. Imagine the hilarious, organization calamity a temporary Yahweh faces when he autofollows all who follow him. Cameo apparance by Nick Jonas in the belly of the Fail Whale.)

The idea behind autofollowing for some was that it was just polite; if somebody follows you, then you should return the favor. For others it was more about seeing just how big they could blow up the balloon without it popping.

While there are third party apps using autofollow, Twitter’s own quietly offered service will be no more. From an email sent out to users by cofounder Biz Stone:

We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous.

In addition to receiving updates from more people than one person could possibly read, those autofollowing also fell victim to Twitter spammers (“spitters,” and one day I’ll successfully coin a phrase dammit) prowling for autofollowers to send their shortened, cloaked malicious links to.

Dave Winer

That Twitter has quasi-secret special services for high profile users might be news to some and seem very unfair. What else might they offer VIPs the general Twitter audience can’t access? But over time it becomes increasingly obvious that Twitter’s road to monetization will intersect with celebrity gated communities. They’re looking to hire a Twitter celebrity (VIP) liaison, and Dave Winer expects Twitter to get snobbier.

“Every day Twitter does more to tip the table away from the individual and more toward the media industry,” he writes.

While autofollowing sends a disingenuous message, don’t be surprised when Twitter suddenly becomes the home of celebrity minutia, which for some reason is always lucrative. Expect this too: ghost-writter celebrity Twitter accounts sponsored by big brands willing to pay a nice sum (Britney’s tweets brought to you by Glenn’s Unfortunate Tattoo Removal.)
 

It’s not so much the lie that matters, sometimes it’s who repeats it. That one blogger posted about Apple’s fictional $800 laptop was inconsequential. That the New York Times dropped it into their vast echo chamber was catastrophic. Investors thinking Apple, during turbulent economic times, had finally decided to tap a hugely untapped market—the low price laptop market—drove the price up, and upon discovery of the fiction stocks subsequently tanked.

Sounds like people lost some money there.

A couple of weeks later, an 18-year-old blogger said Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Out there somewhere in the blogosphere, this lie wouldn’t have mattered. Repeated on a CNN website and by Henry Blodget, and again you’ve got a plummeting stock. This time there were investigations into whether the blogger was trying to manipulate the market to make a little money. Authorities haven’t yet discovered that link, yet.

These two events come at an interesting time in the evolution of blogging. At blogging’s peak, it was seen as the purest exercise of free speech, as spackling on the crumbling walls of journalism—no corporate or legal overseers, no hidden political agendas, real raw, campy, honest, and prone to be wrong on occasion in the most harmless of ways, usually, except during election seasons maybe.

These days, the elite audience that has been discussing blogs since their inception (i.e., not politicians or journalists or “regular” folk) seem very split on the next frontier. Tim Berners-Lee, warning about the potential impact of misinformation on society, has called for a system for vetting websites and labeling them trustworthy or not so that “the thinking of cults” can be suppressed.

Wired’s Paul Boutin this week told the blogging were waters were not just tested, but getting crummy from all the toe-dipping by “cut-rate journalists” and “underground marketing campaigns.” Therefore, bloggers concerned with authenticity are wasting their time trying to get noticed, and should just stop.

Yes, you’re right, authenticity and need for attention don’t always go together.

But then there’s the more Pollyanna ilk that says, despite all the crap out there, what we’ve seen this election season is that the Internet may have effectively taken the wind out of dirty politics’ sails. Well, maybe it’s still worth something after all.