I've been subscribed to @sfshorts on Twitter, which is not about short pants worn in San Fransisco. No, it's a micro-fiction publication run by my friend ElizabethN and her friend (and someone I know online) preinheimer, wherein they publish a full science fiction story within the space of 1 or 2 tweets -- that's a full sci-fi story within 280 characters.

Micro-fiction seems like a great medium for people that aren't as invested in the whole effort of writing, but it offers some challenges of its own. Stylistically, one of the rules seems to be no txt-speak; You can't abbreviate every little thing to make your stories longer. And still, it has to make sense.

The stories I like best are the ones that feel complete or caress a trope. For example, if I can discern the components of a complete story from just the 140 characters, then that makes me happy. I also like it if, after all that, there's also a subtle twist in the story, perhaps something that turns it from something mundane into something purposefully sci-fi.

Here's just one example of the type of micro-story I like:

but why detective? Why save the spoon, with those cred chips and dpads around? Think Rook. A hand-made wooden spoon: An heirloom from earth

It's a mystery. Sure, we don't get the details of the case, but there's only a tweet's worth of text here. Still, you get the idea of a conversation between two investigators, one who can't understand why the standard valuables would be left behind for a spoon. And then you realize that maybe Earth is gone. It packs a lot into the 140 characters, which is why I like it.

And that's just one of many stories I've enjoyed daily from sfshorts.

Anyway, I became inclined recently to see what the effort was for creating a story in this format. It didn't take much but imagination and some editing skill. Probably more of the latter than the former. Here are a handful of stories that I wrote under the 140 character limit. I'm not sure if any of them are sfshorts-quality, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

It crept up behind him. Silent. Slow. And made a meal of him the same way. But such is the way with mistakes of genetic botany.

Their old robot on the fritz, a new one was needed. 5 boxtops and $2 shipping later, it was fully assembled and ambling about the kitchen.

Chased about the galaxy for 700 years by the insectoid race, the refugees finally safely settled on world that looked like a giant larva.

Harold had rewired the microwave so it was only a matter of punching in a date and time to go back to before the messy spaghetti explosion.

The creatures requested only one thing in exchange for a binding peace. In the end, it was cheese that saved us all.

As he fled, rivulets of orange sweat dripped from his temples. The last one infected, all he could do now was settle in for the inevitable.

Technically Philly recently cross-posted a piece to Philadelphia Magazine concerning the most influential Twitter users in Philadelphia. Twitter - along with general social bookmarking sites - have always intrigued me in terms of influence; how emerging topics in the social networks can indicate trends in the real world. This localized aspect of Twitter is also very interesting to me. I can think of a specific example from my recent vacation.

How Influence Matters

Around here at home, the kids have gone crazy for these things called "silly bandz". They're basically rubber bands molded to take a specific shape, like animals or cars or dinosaurs. There are different kinds. Some glow in the dark, some are tie-dyed, some are rare shapes. It's not uncommon to see kids around here wrapped with armfuls of them. But on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia, there was no sign of them.

Maybe Silly Bands are a global fad, and I was just noticing an anomaly caused by a pocket of vacationers, but from my perspective this seems like an instance of having a localized trend, something that reminds me of the Hush Puppies chapter Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point. While I'm sure that rids wearing shaped rubber bands is hardly worth noting to most people, the detection of such a trend seems of obvious importance, since a method that could detect this could probably also be used to detect election trends or public opinion on more important matters.

Quantifying Influence

The debate seems to be over not just who is the most influential, but what qualifies a person as being influential in the first place. The article seems to suggest that merely the number of followers you have is the indicator of how influential you are. I'm not sure I agree with that.

Here's an example. Robert Pattinson is the star of the Twilight movies. (He's the "vampire", and no, I didn't know his name before I went looking just now.) He is on Twitter. He currently has 245,762 followers. That's more than all but one of the people in the Technically Philly list. I can't for the life of me explain why that would make him more influential than, say, Daniel Inouye who has only 723 followers! (Yeah, you didn't know who that was, did you? Sad.)

Clearly, something's amiss.

Spheres of Influence

Obviously, if it comes to running our government and appropriating funds, Mr. Inouye is going to be much more influential than Mr. Pattinson. On the other hand, when influencing teenage girls, the opposite would clearly hold true. So it's a matter of perspective.

Also, consider the scale of audience to influence. I may hold great sway (ha!) over PHP developers in Chester County. But the scale of my audience is quite small. The scale of Pattinson's audience is significantly larger, but perhaps less rich. Overall, he addresses more people, but how hard does he have to try to convince his audience of something?

One should also consider the quality of the influence. If Pattinson told his audience that they should all go out and buy his latest music album (don't they all make them these days?), he'd probably have good success with it. If I told anyone to do anything, they'd just scoff at me. This is kind of what I'd expect even from Inouye's 700 followers, really, even though he probably has more overall influence on matters important to everyone.

Types of (Crazy) Twitter Users

Just like in any media, there are both consumers and publishers of Twitter content. I think these both must also be taken into account when assessing influence.

Whether a Twitter user's original content is within their Twitter stream or linked to from Twitter to elsewhere should be a contributor to influence. Should a Twitter account that simply broadcasts news website updates be called "influential"? No way.

Here's a weird thought: Assume Pattinson started with zero followers like we all did. Maybe before Twilight he only had a handful of friends there as followers and was just as influential among his friends as any of us would be. But then he's in the movie, and he starts to accumulate followers. Does his wider reach on Twitter now make him more influential? Or is he influential because of his status gained via his role in the movie?

Plus, have you noticed how people follow other people - like Pattinson - just because they like that person? There's no way on Twitter to say "I identify with this person" or "I enjoy this person's work" without following them. (Just tweet it! That seems the most reasonable way!) The act of following someone seems to help people identify with them.

There are people I see with thousands of followees and I can't help but wonder how they keep track of the conversations. But they don't. There are tons of people who just follow to follow and don't really read what anyone has to say. Or they just use software to filter it out. I wonder if those 200k+ people really hang on Pattinson's every word...

Anyway, all of this adds up to the fact that using the number of followers is a completely distorted metric for finding influential people on Twitter.

Real Influence

Gloria Bell makes a decent point, that influence is defined by how many people you put into action by your words, online or offline. I don't know how to measure that; I can't think of an API or algorithm that will neatly sum that up for a news blog.

Who is influential can be a deeply personal thing to each of us. Jon Gruber has about as much direct influence on my day as any random Twitter user I'd meet, yet he's in the Technically Philly list. I've actually met Gruber in person, and he's still not had that much influence on me.

I'd be interested to see who the top few people are that those Twitter users consider most influential to them from the stream of people they follow. So I admit I follow Kat Dennings, who is an actress, and who I enjoy reading, but I'm sad to say -- she's not really influencing me that much.

On the other hand, Chris J Davis is someone who always makes me so envious of his dedication to his family, his style of living, and his abundant creativity. And Sean Coates is another example of someone who always seems to have something useful to say, whether it's an insight about code or beer that I hadn't considered, or some provoking opinion on a random off-topic, it often results in a change in something I do, or plan, or think. These guys, to me, are influential, and there is a high percent of people in my list like this. (Sorry if you guys are reading this and I put you on the spot, there.)

I actually enjoy following people who I find inspirational in that way. Oddly, there are people I follow that I find influential, but not on Twitter. On Twitter, it's mostly silly photos or quips or "OH: something funny." I don't expect Twitter to be a philosophical haven, and I don't expect people to use Twitter how I would want them to (hey, I'm not all Dalai Lama on Twitter either), but it's surprising to me how much trite noise there is to sift through from people who I would consider secret, unsolicited mentors outside of Twitter.

There are probably a good many people that I should follow instead of some of the people on my list. Perhaps we should all share these lists of people we individually find influential. More than just a "Follow Friday". We could then discover who among everyone has the most true influence. But really, after all, does that matter as long as we're all exerting and consuming the influence we expect for ourselves?

I've been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I'm not actually that far into the book yet, so there's time for him to come back around, but as yet, I'm finding a lot in the book to disagree with.

Yesterday's discovery of Dooce's clotheswasher issues have added to my dismay. I'm taking a completely different angle than the readers she complains about. Really, I'm not complaining about her at all -- I'm glad she got her washer issues sorted out. But in a similar way to what irritates me about Here Comes Everybody, she makes a point to say that the power of Twitter that we should all use is one that empowers the common man to make changes for the good.

I simply don't think that power exists for people who aren't Dooce or Clay Shirky.

And what really ticks me off about it is that they write blog posts and books about how anyone can use the Power Of Twitter (or similar crowdsourcing online social whatevers) to change the world, but what they seem to fail to mention is that it doesn't hurt - nay, it's required - to have a million followers, or to be the first person to do a thing.

If it was that easy, then Bosch would have heard the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake crying for new appliances and heeded their call. It's not that easy. You need someone with a million followers to bring it to light. And even then, it works once: There aren't free Bosch appliances going to every rescue mission everywhere.

I think that if everyone who lost a cell phone wrote about it online and submitted it to Digg, we'd pretty much not care about that any more. In fact, just after reading the one story presented in Here Comes Everybody, I already don't care about your lost phone being found by some defiant teenager.

What I doubt is that the promise of the power of the crowd extends to my 251 followers, most of whom are bots trying to sell me better hosting, porn, or more followers.

Ultimately, I think that the internet, the social web, has the power to do what these pundits describe, but only under very special circumstances, and certainly not for the people who need it most. In the worst case, this tripe is bought and consumed by people who want to use it to sell me more junk. The altruist in me wants to see positive social change, but I don't see this ending that way. It looks to me like email, yet another avenue for spam.

I've gotten a flood of new people following me on Twitter over the past couple days. If you had done this a week ago, you would already know all about how hectic my work has been this week, how I missed my train into the city to meet up with that work this morning, and how I plowed into the back of a BMW on 202 as a result of missing my train.

If you had signed up a month or two ago, you would have been able to follow my Habari tour from Philly down to BlogOrlando up to Columbus and back. In fact, I told Berta- Don't expect me to call, you will be more informed about what I'm up to if you look at my Twitter page.

So what's so great about Twitter? If you had asked me this or why I signed up back when I first heard about it, I would have told you, seriously, I haven't the foggiest clue. Today, I have very specific reasons why Twitter, as simple and stupid-seeming as it is, is one of the best ideas to land on the web in a while, and would confess to being unable to do a ton of stuff I've done over the last few months without it.

I think the key to Twitter is this: You must get as many of your IRL (in real life) friends to follow you as possible.

Don't mistake this for some kind of social network friend gathering. The goal is not for you to follow people, the goal is for people to follow you. Sometimes, you can do this simply by following your friends to begin with. If you're me, you're discerning about who you choose to follow -- I choose a person either because I like to know what they're doing every day, or their physical proximity to me is such that knowing what they're up to can be helpful. There are people out there who "follow" hundreds of people. I can't imagine that the signal/noise is very useful for following in that case.

In this situation, don't be offended that I'm not following you. When you see how I use Twitter, you might understand better. I also change who I follow depending on where I am, or who I want to know about at the time. In most situations you want to be clued-in on events that are local only to where you are, not events that are happening elsewhere. You don't follow your friends when they're all on the other coast unless you're looking to be depressed about everything you're missing. Also, the flavor of updates is something to take into consideration. The frequency and content of Twitter postings, just like a blog, should be used to decide whether to follow someone, friend in real life or not.

So when you've got your network of followers, what can you do? Here's an example...

I've met a few really great people in Philly, and they follow me on Twitter. I follow these guys too, so that I know what's going on downtown in case I want to try to be involved.

When meeting clients in a rented office space in the city this week (sorry, couldn't use IndyHall for a number of reasons), I didn't really know the area well enough to pick a good local place for a first-time visitor cheesesteak lunch. I sent out the word on Twitter looking for a good place to eat. By lunch time, I had several responses, we chose one and had one of the best cheesesteaks ever.

When BlogPhiladelphia was in town, I sat across the table from Colin who - I kid you not - Twittered for beer. Seriously, the Twitter was like, "My beer glass is empty." Moments later, Colin had free beer, without leaving the table or even speaking. (Unfortunately, most of Colin's tweets from that July evening have mysteriously disappeared, but there is still photographic "evidence".)

That's a silly example of the practical use of Twitter. Sure, these examples are not Earth-shaking, but when I twittered about my unexpected traffic encounter this morning, guys at IndyHall were able to tell my client that I was going to be late even though I did not have a phone number to call there or my client's cell number handy. I don't care how you slice it, that's useful.

If you're just signing up for Twitter to be on the bandwagon, that's ok. I see a lot of folks now using the Habari plugin to post new posts to Twitter (like this one will be shortly) which is neat if people aren't already reading you via a newsreader. It's nice to have your blog writing tracked among other "what I'm doing right now" entries. If that's all you're using Twitter for, you're really missing out on a useful internet tool with influence in the real world. Hopefully, that'll just get you in the door and you'll start using it more and seeing the usefulness of the service beyond a simple vanity notification system.

I've complained about this before, but maybe I'll do it again and someone will listen this time.

I need a little tray gadget that notifies me of RSS updates. It shouldn't be a full reader. It should just display a pretty little popup box when a new entry is added to one of the feeds I read. It should display the content of the entry as text, nothing fancy, and a link to the actual post.

It would be really cool if it synced with my Google Reader account so that when I added a feed there, it would start tracking that one in my tray applet.

Something this simple would make my life so much better. For all of the stuff I build for the web for other people, can someone offer me this simple little program in exchange? Please? Do I have to write this one myself, too.

Want to make it even better? Make it a Windows Twitter client, and have it track the Twitter RSS of the account that it submits to. That would be really slick.