I’m so glad Bitchmeme is back, because it gives me the opportunity to weigh in on what is an awful idea: Authority search in Twitter.

Now let me be clear, the most basic form of the idea isn’t an awful one — that it should be easier to search highly influential Twitter users’ thoughts on specific topics — but the way Loic Le Meur wants to do it is laughably bad.

First of all, he wants this to be based on the number of followers you have. While for some people that’s a good indicator of importance, for others it means nothing. I have 3,600+ followers on Twitter right now, that’s a lot, but there are plenty of people with thousands more simply because they follow thousands of people and pull in the reciprocal follows. If I went out there and followed 15,000 people I’m sure I would get up to near that number of followers very quickly, instead I choose to keep the people I follow to a more manageable 700-ish.

But the problem isn’t me doing that to gain followers (at least I hope not), it’s that there are a ton of quasi-spam Twitter users who do that and many of them have thousands or tens of thousands of followers. They would show up on Le Meur’s “Authority Search.” And if they weren’t, they would start gaming the system to gain more followers so they would show up.

Second, this absolutely would ruin one of the most compelling things about Twitter: That it’s completely democratic. If you want to know what someone has to say on a topic, follow them, no need to have their opinions forced in everyone’s face because they are “more authoritative,” that’s subjective. Dave Winer and Jeremiah Owyang have the right idea for this: Make an option to search for topic within the people you follow.

Third, it’s fine if someone wants to filter out all the Twitter noise and use it to highlight key thoughts being formed by key people, but Twitter itself should not be doing this. Leave Twitter as an equal playing field, let some third party use the APIs to make this — some already have to some extent.

Back in Bitchmeme land, nearly everyone is jumping on this as a bad idea — because it is. But the reasons people are bitching about it so much is because Le Meur’s actually onto something that is in fact a growing problem on Twitter (too much noise), but he proposes a solution without thinking it through.

Find me on Twitter so you can “respect my authori-tay!”

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