How about the virtue of having an intimate social network as opposed to the bigger is better philosophy of Facebookies and Twitter Tweets abound? You know who you are, good people I’m sure, but probably not innovators or personal think machines me thinks.

Maureen Evans, a grad student and poet, got into Twitter back in 2006 and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the colloquial feel of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and then she would respond, again.

Then, in 2007, she began a little project: tweeting recipes; each strictly 140 characters long. She soon gained 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town. The regulars all knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another and even ceased talking to her.

“It became dead silence.”

The reason is this: socializing doesn’t do well on the grand people scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, the participants start to feel anonymous again, and the person they are following, who once seemed like a buddy, now seems larger than life and remote.

“They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,”

Evans says. And that’s when the conversation stops.

When it comes to microfame, the place that you do not want to be is in the middle of the pack. There’s no view of the steering wheel from there!
Maybe the tech world should be designing tools which reward obscurity — which encourage us to remain in the shadows, wrote Clive Thompson on Wired.com. Think about it, the greatest ideas are made solo or in small groups. Just something to keep in mind.