I thought I would ask Matt Biddulph if there was much Asymmetric Follow on Dopplr (a service that by its nature tends to encourage slightly stronger ties – you don’t necessarily want to share your travel schedule with thousands of complete strangers, or to meet up with people you aren’t already somewhat interested in).
He came back with this:
This graph shows the distribution of how many people share with more people than share with them, or vice versa. The hump is slightly higher on the right, indicating that there’s a bias towards sharing with more people than share back.
The peak is centred on zero, indicating that the average traveller shares with about the same number of people that share with them.
Everyone knows idea blogs are better with graphs and thanks to Matt I now have one. Rock. Thanks man!
Musing about politeness and “continuous partial asymmetry” says:
December 8, 2008 at 7:10 am
[…] his Asymmetric Follow post, an absolute must-read. He then followed it up with another, looking at Dopplr rather than Twitter; in between, Tim O’Reilly then tweeted about it to Robert Scoble, connecting the phenomenon […]
Sharon says:
December 10, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Cheers for adding the graph, this definitley helped me take it all in!