‘Follow’ For Blogs

Following someone on Twitter and subscribing to a feed of blog content are similar actions but they feel completely different. Knowing who follows you in real-time creates an immediacy and closeness that makes Twitter a lot more social than subscribing to a blog feed.

Various friend widgets like MyBlogLog and subscriber stat counters provide this type of information for blogs and have been popular since before Twitter existed. It’s interesting to look back now and realize that they were/are probably popular because we naturally want to create closer, more social experiences.

However, the faces found in friend widgets seem more transient compared to those found in follower lists. Some site visitors may appear because they’re logged in to a friend widget and followed a link to your site without knowing what it was. Others might be pushed out of the widget before they’re seen because there are a limited number of slots. Many may not subscribe to your site so the visitor and subscriber numbers don’t tally.

It is possible to join more permanent ‘communities’ on MyBlogLog but this happens away from the site or content or person around which the community was created. If this information was available on each blog, it might help to create a more social experience like Twitter.

Google Friend Connect works more like this and seems to bring people a little closer together. Member profiles include bio information and the other sites they’ve joined. Members can even communicate with each other in the context of each community which isn’t possible on Twitter. You could argue that @ replies allow everyone to communicate with everyone else which is true but there is no context so it’s a different experience.

However, the relationship between site owners and site members still doesn’t feel as explicit or as close as following. Joining a site community and following someone are two different social gestures.

I’m curious as to whether a distributed Follow system that automatically adds someone to a friend widget when they subscribe to a blog feed would bring people closer together. Would it increase interactions and improve blog communities?

It should make everyone more visible and aid discovery of new people – something that feels particularly rich on Twitter – but how much of that can be attributed to the nature of short, easily scanned and responsive bites of content found on Twitter versus the longer, more isolated posts found on blogs?

Supporting social gestures and communal features like ‘retweet’, ‘@’ and ‘#’ found on Twitter may also play a role. I’ll talk about those in another post.

Posted on March 27, 2009