It's probable that a good number of the most-followed users on Quora have disabled or filtered many of the notifications from the site, including new followers and replies to posted content. With the site activity spiking in the last 60 days or so, follower notifications were fast and furious into the in box. Today, Quora appears to have reduced their tax on both users' in box and on their servers, in terms of delivering the messages, by capping the update at a single roundup per day.

Minor update you say? Not worth a blog post? Fine. Skip this one. But it's a trend I'd like to see other services adopt or offer as an option.

Most social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and practically everyone, send you individual notices when a single user connects to you. In theory, you should have the time to scan the user's information and choose to follow them back - or just to ignore them. Quora's daily summary is welcome, and is very similar to the SocialToo daily follow/unfollow notifications that Jesse Stay has been offering paid users for the last few years. (Of note, I am an advisor to SocialToo)


For me, after 3,000 or so follower notifications on Quora, it was nice to have absolutely zero updates between the morning of March 4th, and the wrap-up in the evening of March 5th. Now, if I get a minute or two, I can scan the incoming message for interesting people and dedicate time to this, rather than multiple interruptions per day.

If you've previously turned off notifications from Quora, or want to tweak the settings you have now, they've got extremely granular options you can access on your settings page. And if you want to be added to my following list in tomorrow's message, we can get connected here: http://www.quora.com/Louis-Gray.

The world of social media and networking is much too consumed with numbers, and it seems at times, we are making sacrifices of our time and energy wading through piles of noise and indirect relationships in an effort to obtain the rare connections of serendipity that bring us value.

In the past year, my position on connections in all these networks and with all these people vying for a piece of attention has changed - from an open networking approach, to one much more tidy, and it is constantly being refined. I've had it with seeing the streams where I spend a lot of time overwhelmed by strangers and off-topic behavior, and continue to take steps to improve the experience. Lately, I've resorted to seeing my numbers go in the reverse direction - fewer connections, fewer subscriptions and fewer services.

It's often said "he with the most names wins", but while that may be true for a social network, it's not always true for an individual. You are not a social network. You are just one point in that network.

A year ago, I said to jump on the massive unfollowing trend would be a mistake. At the time, I was following more than 12,000 people on Twitter, and that number eventually climbed to more than 14,000. Similarly, as I accepted connections on Facebook to all who wanted in, that pile of flesh grew to more than 2,000 - not near the network's famous 5,000 limit, but enough that if I ever looked at the "Recent News" feed, I was unlikely to know most of the folks.

What's changed in the last year for me is that I have had to adjust and spend more time on those two networks in particular, making them central points for engagement and discovery. With that post being written on August 6 of 2009, FriendFeed's acquisition by Facebook happened 4 days later, putting the once-vibrant community into practical mummification, making its centricity for my own activity dramatically less useful.

Additionally, more and more services are launching that enable the portability of one's social graph from site to site. For every new service I try, I can automatically discover who else I am already linked to, and get the chance to add them to my network. As others do the same, this increases the volume of service notifications by e-mail, and consequently, the number of updates on each site is proportional to your social graph at the source hubs - usually Facebook, Twitter and Google. Therefore, a reduction of people on any or all of those three services reduces the noise in all other places.

When Facebook launched their new messaging platform two weeks ago, putting an emphasis on the friends in the site having access to your in box, I started to have second thoughts about all these random people I'd blindly said yes to in the last couple years. For every great person who I would meet in the future and learn from, there were others trying to invite me to events and groups that were a waste of time, or whose updates were never catching my eye. So I took the opportunity to get out of the mess I had created.

Thankfully, Facebook has made the process of disconnecting much easier of late. Under the friends tab of the site, you can click "Edit". Sort by All Friends, and you can start to remove folks 1 by 1 with the little x to the right until your feeds are clean again.

In a bloody swoop, I cut more than 1,200 people on the site this way on the 15th, going from 2200+ to less than 1,000. Does this mean fewer people will see my blog posts, my photos or my status updates? Sure. But the benefits are that I know who I am engaging with and the quality of the site has improved a great deal. Before this move, I could only get a good Facebook experience through my6sense.


For Twitter, the work was a little harder, but doable. A few months ago, as discovered by Twittercism, I leveraged SocialToo, where I am an advisor. The first thing I did was whitelist hundreds of my favorite contacts in Twitter, to be sure I wouldn't drop them. Then, I set up content filters on the site to automatically unfollow all people who used any of the major Twitter platforms, like TwitterFeed, Ping.fm, TweetDeck, or even "Web". I left this brutal killer on for about 5 days, and saw the people I was following melt away from 14,000 to about 2,000. Then I stopped the bleeding and took out the noise one by one, to the point I follow just over 1,000 now. Of course, I had to refollow some innocents who were caught in the purge, but most have been fixed. While Twitter still is rough to read in real time (again, my6sense wins here), I am connected to real people I know - and their reshares of other folks' content get the best of the rest.


That leaves two major repositories of content that I also have moved to thin, to reduce content overwhelming my available time. The first was to unsubscribe from services that I don't use. Despite my practical abandonment of some services, that didn't stop people from following me constantly. It's obvious the social graph synchronization with Twitter and Facebook means people aren't even looking at your content, even if you think they are. So for the most egregious notification in box fillers, I just deleted my account. I started with GetGlue and Plaxo and may hit some more if things aren't dramatically improved. The other is in Google Reader. I'm notorious for reading a lot of RSS feeds, and still do, but Reader helpfully shows me just how many updates come from each source to clutter my daily reading. Contrasting the updates to shares I make shows me what I find valuable. For those where the noise ratio was too high, I have been cutting them one by one, and it's saving me hundreds of items a day. Bliss.


Twitter and Facebook hold more value for me in 2010 than they did in 2008. With their improved abilities to hide content by source, and to use lists, friend management has improved a great deal. Plus, they, in addition to Google Buzz and LinkedIn, are practically the only games in town for centralized discussions now. So rather than fight against the grain, it's made sense to make the sites a better experience for me.

There's no harm in letting people go. It's your right to unfollow and unsubscribe. It's their right to bring you value and deliver you a good experience so you don't disconnect. But if you're finding your streams a mess, take a deep breath and do something about it. I am glad I did.

Disclosure: I am VP of Marketing for my6sense, which has an app that supports Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, and sorts by personal relevancy. I am also an advisor to SocialToo.

There's no question the market for determining personal relevance is a hot one. In addition to my6sense, which you've no doubt heard a lot about from me on this week and last, one of the more interesting players in this space is The Cadmus. After debuting in November of last year as a real-time stream filter to eliminate duplicates, the company found a solid position determining personalized aspects of Twitter, including trending topics, which launched in February, and trends by list the following month. Now, the company is branching out with an API that lets other Twitter clients tap into Cadmus for personal relevance.
   
The Cadmus At Work in TweetAgora, Tapping Their New API

If this sounds a lot like what my6sense is doing - that's because it is! my6sense introduced an attention API earlier this March at the DEMO conference, letting partners order all streams, from RSS to Twitter and Facebook, by relevance. With information overload being a serious problem for most active social networkers, and few content sources and clients doing much more than offering streams ordered by chronology, there is clearly a gap to be filled.

Cadmus is also teaming up with a lesser-known Twitter client called TweetAgora to raise the visibility of the good stuff while hiding the rest. TweetAgora highlights the opportunity as "Find the goods." and "Filter the junk.", including muting tweets by keyword, muting individuals, conversations, and blocking specific services, including Foursquare, Gowalla and Formspring.

Muting individuals has been closely associated with Twitter client Brizzly, from ThingLabs, and SocialToo, Jesse Stay's company, who I advise, also offers the option to mute or unfollow people by keyword, and to unfollow people based on the service used to update Twitter.

Cadmus' ability to launch an API with an active partner is a solid start, and the company is actively seeking out partners. You just might hear about some of their news tonight during an event with Seesmic.

To download TweetAgora, featuring Cadmus, head to the iTunes store here.

Disclosures: I am vice president of Marketing at my6sense, an assumed competitor of The Cadmus. I am also an unpaid advisor to SocialToo.

Parallel to my public activity on the blog and in various social networks, piled on top of my real-world work with Paladin Advisors Group and the home life of raising twins, I have added a number of advisory roles to startups in the last two years. The first to come my way was BuzzGain (since sold to the Meltwater Group), and current positions include, in order of chronology, SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and QwoteBook. I've been approached for other roles, but for various reasons opted out. My activity with these companies, their founders, engineers and others, as well as seeing other activities from fellow advisors, has put me in a position to recognize the good and the bad, so I thought I would share.

First things first, an advisor to a company, especially a startup that is pre-revenue or in the early stages of revenue recognition, is not lucrative in any way. Most companies tag four or so advisors, offering 1-2% of the company, and in some cases much less, for their work, and no money changes hands. It's not an official position in the company, like an employee, and there is no fiduciary responsibility, as would be the case with board of director seats in a public company.

The role of an active and engaged advisor is to provide guidance and assistance to the company, using all their resources available, and to find opportunities for the company to find new partnerships, users or visibility where appropriate. This can mean sitting in conference calls with engineers where the service's roadmap is discussed, and offering feedback on direction or lobbing suggestions yourself. This can mean acting as an early adopter and finding holes in the product, sending them by e-mail and offering an alternative. It can mean introducing people at the company to people within your own network, who may be interested in the product themselves, or can bring the product more awareness. It can even mean sitting down with PowerPoint and cranking out a VC deck if fundraising is in the cards.

But in almost all cases, advisors don't write a single line of code, and the capabilities and direction of the company still comes from the CEO/founder and the engineers themselves who are turning ideas into reality. No matter of advice and enthusiasm can help when milestones are missed or priorities of the individuals impacting the company go astray.

What an advisor is absolutely not is an unabashed fanboy and overly enthusiastic booster of the product. Any time it is clear that an advisor has slipped from a partner of a company to an aggressive spammer who can't fail to mention the company or its products all over the Web, a line has been crossed. But it can be helpful for the person to have the company in mind when opportunities arise throughout the extended network, and to occasionally message on their behalf - with tact.

I initially worked with BuzzGain because I believed PR companies were doing a very poor job of targeting the blogosphere. That turned out to be true and I think still is. I teamed up with ReadBurner because I believe strongly in the act of highlighting popular shared items on the Web and enabling discovery. Unfortunately, that project didn't meet all my hopes and was closed at the end of last year. I worked with SocialToo because Jesse Stay had introduced some top tools to manage Twitter streams and followers, and to block spam. Twitter continues to evolve as does his product, and it is essential for me. I added my name to TeensInTech because I want to help the next generation of geeks to have a central place to communicate and share ideas. This project is still ongoing. I joined up to MyLikes because I detest unfocused advertising and want to see people benefit from trusted recommendations. And most recently, I am working with Qwotebook to help bring a permanent repository for the amazing things so many people are saying which are often floating into the ether.

I have seen some of my peers sign on as advisors to companies even if they privately don't like the product, simply because they think they might make money in the end. This is not an advisor you want. I have attended advisory board meetings only to have the same people not show up who didn't show up last time. They are not advisors you want. And I know you don't want advisors who are unwilling to risk their own "personal brand" to do work on your behalf.

Two months ago, one company approached me with an option to be on their advisory board. I said no. Not because I didn't like them or because I was too busy or because I didn't think they had a future. It was because I just wasn't familiar enough with their product and didn't want to be disingenuous. Since that time, I have started using their product and think it's great. And in that time, an announcement already went out with their new advisory board, without my name on it. Do I consider that a missed opportunity? Not really. Even if I miss out on some great engagement and a few dollars some day, it was not the right time, and my intentions would have been wrong.

Entrepreneurs are already stretched with their resources and their time. It is critical that when the time comes to find partners who are going to have blood and sweat equity with you, who can help build your product and find you new outlets, that you pick the right people who are entrepreneurial themselves, who are willing to take calls at odd hours, and who truly care about helping you achieve your vision. If you choose wrong, all you have done is given up equity to people who are along for the ride, and you may have to work even harder to chase them down. So do choose well.

I told you before, I am not a fanboy, not even to the companies I am working with where I do get deep insight into their plans. But I do care, and I will keep fighting on behalf of users from the inside, and then fighting for them when the time is right.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to SocialToo, TeensInTech, MyLikes and Qwotebook.

Increased use of Twitter has made the users sharing and clicking on links more attractive to both legitimate businesses and ill intended people looking to steal passwords or guide you to unsavory sites. Seemingly each week there are new stories about phishing attempts that prey on direct messages (DMs) from trusted people, and if compromised, these accounts could lead to more spam, just spreading the mess further. SocialToo, a company led by Jesse Stay, and one where I am an advisor, has opted to take a proactive approach to enable phishing protection for all users, not just those with a premium setup, or those who had manually enabled filters themselves. The result is a much-improved, and safer, Twitter environment.

The move, as outlined in Jesse's post from this morning, means that anybody who has ever created a SocialToo account, even a free one, is protected from receiving direct messages that contain known phishing attempts.

Prior to today's move, SocialToo had already blocked nearly 20,000 malicious messages, just on the 2,000 users who had enabled the feature, an average of about 10 per user. With phishing protection now enabled for 60,000+ accounts, the volume should similarly scale thirty-fold.

Over the time Jesse has been working on SocialToo, there have been multiple instances where his application has publicly noted phishing attempts faster than any official word from Twitter, or the press covering Twitter. Rather than leverage this opportunity to extract money from users, we agreed it made more sense to do the right thing and get these protections out to the much wider audience.

"As has always been a priority, we feel keeping your stream clean and the web in general a cleaner place is important," he writes. "Hopefully this makes a significant change in how clean the streams of Twitter users are."

As an advisor, and as a SocialToo user, I have had phishing protection enabled on my account for quite some time, and the coverage of such attacks almost catches me amused, as I never see the ill-intended direct messages targeting my mail box. In fact, SocialToo tells me more than 140 direct messages to me have already been filtered, automatically.

I believe that using Twitter without having SocialToo enabled would be as silly as running a Windows computer without having antivirus enabled. Even if you won't convert to the premium plans offered by SocialToo, you should set up an account to get your Twitter messages protected.

DISCLOSURE: I am an unpaid advisor to SocialToo. I hold a small equity stake in the company.

Many Twitter users are caught in an odd conundrum - between being open to random connections and being open to a glut of unfocused spam-like bot behavior. While I believe the allure of high follower counts has largely been eroded, thanks due in part to the controversial Suggested User List and growth of spam accounts with high connection numbers, many still see higher "value" in the raw numbers of the network. So how does one maintain an open door policy that allows for two way direct messaging all while keeping one's stream clean? the answer is different for everyone, it seems, but I thought I would share some of the ways I am leveraging SocialToo, a service I advise, to improve my Twitter experience.

When I first started using Twitter, I enabled autofollow by SocialToo, so I could automatically be connected to people, enable two way direct messaging, and not look disconnected. But as junk followers figured this out, my steam became overwhelmed with direct marketers and news repeaters that didn't add to the conversation. So, while avoiding the option to do a mass unfollowing of all (see a post on that from September), I first turned off the autofollow option and have taken subsequent steps to clean up the results.



First Step: Block all direct messages that are spam or for viral games.

SocialToo lets me block DMs that contain keywords or search strings like "Mafia Wars". I can either block those DMs outright, or have that person be unfollowed.

Second Step: Block all direct messages that are for phishing schemes.

SocialToo, once notified of an ongoing scam, blocks all direct messages that match a specified string for all SocialToo users, myself included. This way, even though I use a Mac instead of Windows, I won't even be tempted to click on a fake URL, because I'll never even see it.

But even then, I still saw a lot of marketing and garbage in my feed. Preferring not to unfollow everybody and make a mess of things, I started to unfollow junk one by one in my stream, separating the bots from the people. That worked, but it doesn't scale to the thousands of folks who might need 1-1 attention this way. But what I did notice was a pattern. The spammers and repeat Tweeters were almost all using automated tools to generate their dreck, usually from "API" or from TwitterFeed.

Third Step: Ask SocialToo to unfollow all Twitterfeed or Blip.fm or API bots.

I reached out to Jesse and asked him if he could enable SocialToo to automatically unfollow the bots in my stream who I identified were using these tools. In the first two days, more than 1,000 bots were cleaned up, and in the last few months, as I've used this unreleased feature, about 3-4,000 followed have evaporated, leaving me with a still large following count, but a much more relevant count.

Yes, there are some legitimate people using Twitterfeed, and so they too got unfollowed, which leads to stage four.

Fourth Step: Add people to my SocialToo whitelist to never unfollow.



Some of the people I automatically unfollowed noticed and let me know. On other occasions, I found it out myself, and thought that was silly, so I just logged into SocialToo and added them to my whitelist which means no matter the tool they use, they will still be connected.

In the few months of reducing the noise on Twitter, I have reduced the people I have been following from almost 15,000 at peak, to just over 10,000 today. I expect that barring my following more groups of people, this week I should drop below 10,000 total and the service will look better and better.

I may advise SocialToo, but I do so for reasons just like this. Sometimes issues I find can lead to real product features. And while Jesse hasn't yet rolled out the option to unfollow based on a specific source, he may in the future, and you'll see real benefit.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to SocialToo and have a minor percentage equity stake.

SocialToo, a social Web utility aimed at enhancing your experience on Twitter, Facebook and other sites, is well known for its autofollowing capabilities. But with the rise of marketing and spam on some sites, Twitter especially, the noise has gotten out of control for some people - as you have seen a small number unfollow all their connections, in effect rebooting their accounts, and others complain mightily about the noise that has arisen from junk direct messages. With a new feature introduced today, SocialToo has made it very easy to stop those broadcasting junk into your stream with one click.

The new feature extends Twitter's capability of bringing direct messages to your e-mail, and adds options below to let you report the sender as spam, block them, or report them as sending automated direct messages. And unlike competitors, including Topify, it can be done without having to send this specific message to one of their dedicated e-mail addresses.

As an advisor to SocialToo, I often get access to some of the features early, and this enhancement has already paid dividends. Now, instead of just manually deleting the DM, I can click and send the person's annoyance away forever.



One DM via SocialToo I Was Ready to Zap

More than just this utility, SocialToo lets you set up a blacklist of keywords from within the site that you may never want to see in DMs, ever. That means you never have to see updates from Mafia Wars or Spymaster or whatever your least favorite junk spam of the week is. That can be found in your SocialToo account's preference tab here: http://socialtoo.com/twitter

If there is a way to communicate with people, spammers will do their part to find an exploit. SocialToo is trying to be part of the solution and helping to clean up your social networking experience.

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Disclosure: I am an advisor to SocialToo

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Last week, many people were surprised by Facebook releasing a utility that let Fan Page owners update Twitter from the popular social network. But some thought Facebook did not go far enough - as individuals could not utilize this tool to broadcast their own update from their profiles. This morning, Jesse Stay's SocialToo launched a feature which will let users update both Facebook and Twitter - not just for their fan pages, but from anywhere on the site.

Using the SocialToo Status application, you can share your personal status from Facebook to your personal news feed, as well as Twitter.

If you are already a SocialToo user, go to http://www.socialtoo.com and click the "Facebook App" link to activate SocialToo Status. Once the application is enabled for your account, you will see a SocialToo Status icon in the "attachments" section of Facebook, which you can update from the home screen, or your personal profile. If you have already associated your Twitter account with Facebook, it will ask for permission to publish, and following this, you're all set. You can even grant the application permission to publish from fan pages you may run as well.


If enabled, my posts from Facebook can flow to Twitter as well.

For a long time, power users of social media tools have found ways to bring their Twitter updates into Facebook. But now, you're seeing the first tools start to take data the other direction. You can also find the SocialToo application on Facebook here: http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo/status.

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Disclosure: I am an advisor to SocialToo

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For weeks, in my ever-increasing list of potential future blog post topics, I have had one titled, "What If I Purged My Twitter Followers?". Trust me, the option has crossed my mind on the rare occasion I log in and try to use Twitter or any of its 3rd party apps in the way the Twitter team had intended - as I watch update after inane update swim in a sea of half-baked offers and hashtaggery. But even as I see some notable folks talking about taking apart their list of connections with the subtlety of Jack Nicholson wielding an axe in The Shining, I'm still ignoring the temptation to join them. While I may weed out some clear spammers now and again, I think to massively prune my list would introduce more problems, real and emotional, than it would present solutions.

Since I started using Twitter in early 2008, I have somehow amassed more than 12,000 connections. Thanks to my employing an auto-follow capability from SocialToo, a company run by Jesse Stay who I advise, those who add me as a connection in Twitter gain a reciprocal move almost instantaneously, without my lifting a finger. While some may think this is "disingenuous", doing so saves me the time of reviewing each new follower one by one to gauge "worthiness", and it also enables them to send me direct messages - as Twitter will block the capability otherwise.


Scoble's Unfollowing Is Easily Seen Via TwitterCounter
I recognize there are problems with spammers on Twitter. I get my fair share of automated direct messages. I see ridiculous accounts that look more like robots than people. But if I set an artificial standard that required me to have a personal relationship with an individual in order to follow them on Twitter or any network, I would be selling myself short in terms of getting to potentially know the person, and I would be selling them short by not giving them a chance when it is likely they just wanted to be connected in an environment where they were comfortable.

Assuming I were to abstain from using an auto-unfollow service (SocialToo does this also), and I took 10 seconds to review each of the 12,000 accounts, it would take more than 33 hours to adequately cleanse my feed. And I know if I did use an unfollowing service, a lot of great people would be thrown out with the bathwater. I saw Scoble's experiment, only to have it impact friends of mine like Drew Olanoff and Kent Newsome, who are both real humans who contribute on Twitter and other networks. I know, without question, that there are many future peers on the Web that I just haven't had the luck to meet yet.

Benjamin Franklin, once paraphrasing Blackstone's formulation, said, "It is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." So too do I see it better that 100 spammers fill my feed than I lose access to the innocents who remain. I am not so self-centered as to believe I know the full set of people who I can learn from and derive value. So don't look for me to start shaking my numbers down on any of the networks - even if it is getting more popular.

Also see: Twitter is for Following Topics and Listening, Not for Following People from February 26th for more background on this.

Thanks to bumps in my schedule, including work, and of course, the twins, combined with the complexities of trying to get seven people in three time zones to get synched up, it has been some time since we got to participate in TheSocialGeeks podcast, chaired by Chris Miller (otherwise known as IdoNotes).

But on Wednesday, we made it, and got the chance to record. In addition to Chris and me, were Sarah Perez and Wayne Sutton.

In the podcast, which I have made available for download below, we discuss:

• Facebook's Vanity URL Rush
• LiveFlows
• Floxee
• Monetization of Twitter Streams
• Social Identity Management
• The Palm Pre
• SocialToo and other premium Twitter apps

You can read more about it in Chris' site, or Download the Recording Now. You can also: Subscribe in iTunes

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By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

It would appear that Twitter has launched a brand new format for their new follower notification E-mails they send out to users opting to be alerted to new followers. The e-mails are now in a prettier HTML format and include the new follower's name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have. While users aren't given the option to follow straight from the e-mail, you can block the user by clicking on a link in the e-mail.

The New Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications

The Old Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications
Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

My friend, Jason McGowan, sent me a screenshot that, if it is what it appears to be, suggests Facebook may be getting ready to add a new strategy to its business plan. It appears that select users are seeing polls in Facebook, asking if they would pay to be able to have their own vanity nickname on the network.
Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.