Monday, July 19, 2010

The Road to "Follow"

As posted in EA's blog, the concept of Follow will soon be revised to make it more meaningful and orderly. The question is: is it really necessary?

As someone fairly new to EA, one of the very first thing I noticed, and many would have also, is how eager people would like you to Follow them. A closer look at the Achievements would show that it is more out of a desire to get the Leader of the Pack set of Achievements, a total of $3,000 value. So the tendency is to Follow anyone with the hope that they will Follow you back rather than linking to individuals with similar interests.

Now, what will happen if you remove that set of Achievements? You now have natural reasons to Follow a certain individual, which can include potential investments and simply because you like their content. Within the context of EA, there is limited reason for putting in Categories like "Family and Friends", etc. Even categories like "Recommended Buys" and "Recommended Sells" could likewise be triggered by existing alert systems. And given our human limits, I doubt if anyone would Follow more than a handful of other Influencers.

Still, the categorization would be quite a welcome feature for orderly individuals, and I don't think it would hurt others who've been using the Follow feature reasonably. But I doubt if it could be used as a way to curb rampant Following.

On the lighter side, I decided to have fun with the Follow feature yesterday, knowing that it would be changed soon anyway. Turns out I can only Follow a certain number of individuals, which I think can be expressed as (3 x Followers) + 1. If you can confirm this, please let me know.

Lastly, don't forget to Follow me! And buy my shares!

2 comments:

  1. There is definitely a ratio. Three to one sounds right, but others can confirm. There will also be absolute limits on the numbers you can list with the new system.

    I will list friends even if there is no achievement for it. However, I believe that being listed will increase your EA calculated influence.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi William,

    Thanks for your comments. I hope you can also open up your profile so I can see your blog/s. It may just be an interesting read :)

    Back to the topic, absolute limits can have its pros and cons. I would advocate more for reasonable activity within a time period sort of limit. Like, how many profiles can you evaluate within a given period of time to decide whether or not to Follow them? Not as many as the 200 that I did within less than an hour for sure :)

    I would also be discussing this reasonable activity thing in future posts. So I hope you guys could join in the discussions. Thanks

    ReplyDelete