Nonetheless, interesting take – thanks for adding to what is becoming quite the discussion!

- except I would argue that if the people are on a social networking site, which they had to join to have an account on, the percentage of joiners would be significantly higher since they have already demonstrated that they are joiners by signing up

Speaking for myself, I always look – I don’t want to friend a spam site, a person more interested in selling me something, etc… And I’ve read danah boyd, who says “… that “public displays of connection” serve as important identity signals that help people navigate the networked social world, in that an extended network may serve to validate identity information presented in profiles.” danah’s research implies that they do, in fact, look.

- I’d agree that they do look for people they know. I know I do, if someone friends me I’ll glance through their contacts to see if there is any name or face I recognize. But I don’t usually click on the profiles of their contacts that I don’t know. So I wouldn’t know if another friend was a dentist or a librarian. Since, as danah points out, most people are looking to reinforce connections they already have, not seek out connections with people they don’t know, I think this is the approach most people take. They look the profiles of people they don’t know when someone they know interacts with them, to expand their connections. Think Facebook, you friend me, if I didn’t know you I can glance at your friends and see if I know anyone (FB actually tells me how many friends we have in common). After we are friends you activity shows up in my news feed on my home page, so if you comment on the Wall of a one of your friends I don’t know I’ll see it. This is the public display of connection, in a way by your connection with them you are vouching for them and the info in their profile and introducing them to me. Depending on how interested I am in what you said I may look at the persons profile and possibly friend them too.

Having a lot of contacts might look good on your profile page, but it doesn’t serve any other purpose if you are reaching out to people who aren’t interested or are outside your sphere of action. And to my way of thinking, having a lot of contacts is not necessarily a benefit – when I get a request, I always look at the number of FOLLOWERS an account has as well as the number of people they are following. For the way I choose to use the tool, people with a big gap between those numbers are not generally people I want to follow me. There are exceptions that I make for institutions which ARE active in my sphere (such as BART – Bay Area Rapid Transit). But those exceptions are unlikely to include a library in another state, unless the employees fall under my “friend” umbrella.

My feeling is that a lot of people don’t understand that different users of Twitter have different goals and that therefore there are multiple usage patterns. Your recommendation of Darren Rowse’s article was spot on and should hopefully help give folks some direction.

There were a couple of great presentations on how to attract the digital locals at Internet Librarian. I wrote a post about two of them here: http://gathernodust.blogspot.com/2008/11/whos-talking-about-your-library.html