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In my browser I add a User Style Sheet and point it to this new file.

Very true, and the five behaviors you list are spot-on. Maintain a moral compass against such things, sure. But recognize these are the basic human traits with which we come equipped. And design accordingly.

On your User Info page on Livejournal, the list of who you’ve friended is always displayed. However, you choose if you wish to display the list of those who’ve friended you, or mutual friends. (see a screenshot of the options.)

When you were logged in, you could see the numbers yourself, but others couldn’t. It raises a bit of a different question of validation: is it more important to you that people follow you, or does it give you more credibility from others?

Which is the true motivator? Collecting, or displaying our collection?

I like what you’ve done here but I have a different take on the behavioral accounting. Collecting things and collecting numbers and having numbers signify our status, being different things to me…

I tried to break it down here back at mine. Would love to continue:
http://bit.ly/4p3GLn

And certainly there is a whole spectrum to this…you could make ranking public (like Top 10 Twitterers) without making the actual numbers public.

Here’s another question: is it in Twitter’s best interest to keep the numbers public? Does it drive use of the service?

Newcomers now get a pre-populated system with:
5 shops
10 employees
3 products in 2 categories

Users love it – instead of getting a blank sheet they can pitch in and make the dummy set-up look like their real company.

The shops for example are
“Shop 1 (click here to change me)”
“Shop 2 (click here to change me)”

I also wonder, if people were to choose for one month whether they can only tweet (but not to read others) or only read other tweets (without tweeting themselves) what would they choose?

Quantity does not equate to quality. I think there should be some other system which could give a sense of quality rather than followers. The longer you are on twitter, or any social network, the more time you have to collect “hangers-on” which inflates your numbers. Similar to the delicious popular list, it is an echo chamber that is self-referential.

A better system for quality might be the number or replies from a diverse set of people, much like Google’s pagerank system.

Having a count encourages gaming the system as well as dumbing content down to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes I WANT niche content that is designed for a small group of people, i don’t want that person to change their style or compromise their tweets just to get a larger audience. People should be taught that if you have 10 happy followers is better than having 1000 that don’t care.

For example, I run a community site for executives. In my product interviews, we always touch on recognition / attention, and without fail they all rate it poorly.

Either they aren’t interested in it, or they don’t want to admit that they are interested in it. I’m guessing it’s the latter and we’re still pushing forward with some lite recognition features.

I also agree with KingJohnny – I’ve found twitter to be less useful recently because I’m not able to start or engage in conversations anymore.

While it may be true that Twitter followers really should be at least displayed as a personal reputation, it isn’t at all clear that it needs to be public. You’re right that it depends heavily on the behavior you’d like to encourage. Public encourages follower hoarding for the sake of personal status. Myself? I would be just as happy to have less followers – just the ones who actually are interested in what I have to say.

Also relevant to this conversation, we’ve recently completed a draft of chapter 6, which proposes a system for classifying incentives for user participation, at least as it pertains to creating reputation systems: altruistic (for the good of others), commercial (to generate revenue), and egocentric (for self gratification).

It’s all up and we welcome comments.

Randy Farmer