Ever get the feeling that we’re trying to make something, designed for one task, do another?

I’m reminded of THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN‘s excellent post at the New York Times about  Cars, Kabul and Banks where he wrote about “the core truth” of a situation that could apply to almost anything, including Twitter and measurement.

“…. If there is anything I’ve learned as a reporter, it’s that when you get away from “the thing itself” — the core truth about a situation — you get into trouble.”

What is the core truth about Twitter?

Twitter’s core truth is that it’s a tool to tell people what your doing at any moment; over the last 18 months, or so, it morphed into many other things, but the core reality of Twitter is as a communications tool – not an influence tool or an authority tool - things that it was never designed to do or measure.  Keep t hat in mind as I go over what’s happened in the last few days and my thoughts about it.

First, Loic Le Meur, the French Industrialist, who runs Seesmic and LeWeb posted Twitter needs a Search By Authority in his blog; he wanted  to solve a problem he was having in getting actionable feedback (something Twitter was not originally designed to do) from Social Media and got frustrated; he wanted a way to cut through the “clutter” and find the opinions that he though really mattered. However, Noisy Channel pointed out that Loic Le Meur Misses the Point of Twitter – it was created as a communications channel, not a marketing channel.  Any Loic asked for this:

“..There were more than 7000 tweets posted during the two days of LeWeb, no way anyone can read them quickly. We need filtering and search by authority.”

“…What we need is search by authority in Twitter Search. Technorati had nailed it years ago by allowing searches filtered by number of links the blogger had.”

Michael Arrington – ever ready to pick a fight so he can generate more traffic through controversy (which seems to work – see Was the Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur and Le Web row staged?) pointed out that Bloggers Lose The Plot Over Twitter Search

“… I agree with Loic. Being able to filter search results, if you choose, by the number of followers a user has makes sense. Without it, you have no way of knowing which voices are louder and making a bigger impact. It’s a way to make sense of a query when thousands or tens of thousands of results are returned.

Of course, I’m pretty sure I can live without this feature, too. I’m failing to get too worked up over it. But the outpouring of emotion from bloggers is surprising me, and I thought I’d seen just about everything when it comes to blogging.”

Others like LalaWag wrote about If Loic Le Meur Ran The Web we’d all have 4 hour lunches and internet would never work at conferences which got some people laughing out loud.  Anyway – I don’t have the luxury of detailing the entire thread of replies – but you can get a swath of them using Blogpulse’s Conversation Tracker.

However, I’m going right for Eric T. Peterson’s post at Web Analytics Demystified blog about Measuring success in Twitter: Influence vs. Participation where I’m cited (see some of that, below:

• Jeremiah Owyang earns a score of 2.95 indicating that Jeremiah “may be a popular person” and “people want to hear what [Jeremiah] has to say” plus he “may be a thought leader in [his] community.” Sounds pretty much perfect to me, but I like Jeremiah.
• Bryan Eisenberg earns a score of 1.04 indicating that Bryan is “respected among [his] peers” (or that he follows his Mom and she follows him, but with 1,951 followers we can assume the former is the best explanation)
• Marshall Sponder earns a score of 2.30 which is pretty similar to Jeremiah’s score against his 851 followers.
• Avinash Kaushik earns a score of 105.5 indicating that Avinash is “either a Rock Star in [his] field or an elitist [who] cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter” who “likes to hear [himself] talk” but “luckily others like to hear [him] talk too.”
• Anil Batra earns a score of 1.27 putting Anil in the same category with Bryan above although with only 266 followers his reach is somewhat lower than Bryan.
• Aaron Gray earns a score of 1.49 pushing Aaron more towards Jeremiah Owyang than Bryan Eisenberg, at least on Dave’s scale.
• Jim Sterne earns a score of 17.48 which is in the same “Rock Star” range as Avinash (although an order of magnitude less rock-starry  than Google’s own analytics evangelist)
• Omniture earns a score of 1.26 indicating respect among the company’s 247 followers
• Dennis Mortensen earns a score of 13.85 showing that Dennis, like Jim and Avniash, is a true web analytics rock star!
• Nick Arnett earns a score of 0.58 which indicates that Nick is trying but alas, “not getting much Twitter love in return.”

But … aren’t we trying to come up with authority and influence “after the fact”? If we really wanted to measure Authority or Influence (see Mem3x blog)- different platforms would have to evolve or be created whose core purpose is to measure authority or influence – not communicate.

“…. One way of doing that is to go back to Steven Lukes’s wonderful book in which he argues that power can take three forms: 1. the ability to force you to do what you don’t want to do; 2. the ability to stop you doing something that you want to do; and 3. the ability to shape the way you think.

In my experience, the last interpretation comes closest to describing the authority of the blogosphere’s long tail. It’s got nothing to do with the number of readers a particular blog has, but everything to do with the intellectual firepower of the blog’s author. That’s why I pay attention to Ed Felten, Tony Hirst, Nick Carr, Bill Thompson, Richard Posner, Dave Winer, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, Martin Weller, Lorcan Dempsey, Larry Lessig, Andrew Brown, Jeff Jarvis, Charles Arthur and a host of others. Their importance to me derives not from the number of readers they have (though some have large audiences) but from the fact that they are original, well-informed, thoughtful people.

In other words, Authority (within a community) is based on “perceived reputation” by a defined community.

Where’s the community measurement part of Twitter?  It doesn’t exist – that’s not it’s core truth – the reason why it exists.

We can get into making Twitter and Facebook mean all kinds of things – but I think, if we really want accurate measures of influence and authority – we’ll need to use platforms created and used for that purpose (ie: much as questionnaires and focus groups are used - and good luck getting a lot of tweeters to use such a tool/platform).