More interesting than friend and follower numbers are join date, the number of posts and the number of lists. For perspective, I've added some bloggers who probably don't answer to the name 'critic'. Although I've never met Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey, who is "coming back"  to the head of the line as Twitter "product boss", I did talk to him on the phone in early 2007, and he agreed to help us with our Kiva.org initiative by promoting it on Twitter's front page. Thanks Jack, you're awesome!

The first seven wine personalities (beginning with the king, "The Vee") are all from North America. The UK component, led by Jane Anson and Jamie Goode got on the train about 1 year later. Toward the end of 2009, over 3 1/2 years after the first tweet, two and a half years after Gary Vaynerchuck, France, one of the foremost wine producing nations, wakes up to Twitter. Finally, 4 1/2 years after the first tweet, 3 1/2 after The Vee, French critic Monsieur Michel Bettane joined Twitter.

First Tweet ever:

@jack (Jack Dorsey) Twitter: 2006-03-21  Posts: 9635 Listed: 12001

 @LastGlass (Randulo Bordeaux) Twitter: 2006-10-27 Posts: 2348 Listed: 12

@randulo (Randulo Bordeaux) Twitter: 2007-03-17 Posts: 11547 Listed: 172

North American Beginnings

@garyvee (Gary Vaynerchuk)  Twitter: 2007-05-04 Posts: 45079 Listed: 13210

@1WineDude (Joe Roberts)  Twitter: 2007-12-15  Posts: 24300 Listed: 608

@drvino (Dr Vino)  Twitter: 2008-03-21 Posts: 4934 Listed: 816

@RemyCharest (Rémy Charest)  Twitter: 2008-06-01 fr Quebec, Quebec Posts: 19995 Listed: 288

@NatalieMacLean (NatalieMacLean)  Twitter: 2008-11-07  Posts: 9065 Listed: 1116

@alicefeiring (alicefeiring)  Twitter: 2008-11-10  Posts: 3808 Listed: 238

@Burghound (Burghound Report)  Twitter: 2008-11-16  Posts: 179 Listed: 144

Great Britain arrives..., then more Yanks

@newbordeaux (jane anson)  Twitter: 2008-11-28 Posts: 2819 Listed: 147

@jamiegoode (Jamie Goode) Twitter: 2009-01-27 Posts: 4341 Listed: 366

@Decanter (Decanter)  Twitter: 2009-02-26  Posts: 2329 Listed: 794

@ericasimov (Eric Asimov)  Twitter: 2009-03-30  Posts: 2569 Listed: 803

@ozclarke (Oz Clarke)  Twitter: 2009-04-01 Posts: 245 Listed: 452

@WineSpectator (Wine Spectator .com)  Twitter: 2009-04-27 Posts: 2965 Listed: 1276

@EmmanuelDelmas (Sommelier) Twitter: 2009-04-30 Posts: 2642 Listed: 75 (Early for France)

@antrose33 (Anthony Rose) Twitter: 2009-08-13 en London, UK Posts: 665 Listed: 86

@nealmartin (Neal Martin) Twitter: 2009-09-23 Posts: 1105 Listed: 198

@JancisRobinson (Jancis Robinson)  Twitter: 2009-05-08 Posts: 2946 Listed: 1792

@JamesSuckling (James Suckling)  Twitter: 2009-04-23  Posts: 3920 Listed: 440

More France

@BourgogneLive (Bourgogne-Live) Twitter: 2009-11-28 Posts: 10903 Listed: 232

@Vindicateur (Le Guide) Twitter: 2009-12-12 fr  Posts: 1881 Listed: 61

and, finally...

@RobertMParkerJr (Robert M Parker, Jr)  Twitter: 2009-12-22  Posts: 805 Listed: 911

I looked for Michel Bettane who was recently known as @LeGrandTasting but that page doesn't exist anymore.

@BettaneDesseauv (Bettane et Desseauve) Twitter: 2010-11-22 Posts: 24 Listed: 3

I just had a funny experience and it pointed out something about our humanity and how we differ from machines even when we talk via cyberspace. A songwriter I met in Fresno years ago touched base with me on the social newtork I hate to hate. Since I don't use it to communicate, I asked him to email me which he did. He said hello and asked about me. I know about the fame he has acquired through a mutual friend. What was funny was that a lyric of one of his songs popped into my head and I wrote back to him, "Did you wirte this line?". He immediately wrote back saying, "you're probably the only person who remembers this song, other than me me!"

This gave me a kind of thrill, because I only know I heard the first line in a song by a guy who went on to become a hugely successful songwriter, played to me by our mutual friend, also a great songwriter in a far off California town, probably over 40 years ago.

I've never thought much about that song or the first line, but it just popped back in my head from an era when the whole band was living together in a big house on Grant Steet, with someone's cousin from Oklahoma cooking big breakfasts for us every morning. We used to go out on the roof at sunrise after a night of... what I suppose my parents might have called some kind of "degenerate behavior". Once I went up there at sunset. I remember telling my mom in a letter that "the sunset was just as beautiful as the sunrise", thinking it was "'heavy", and you know, she was younger than I am now!

Why do I remember the name of my elementary school principal (about a half century has passed) but not the name of the foxy Japanese-Americal girl I was so into in high school, with those legs that went from Alaska to Baja California? Are you out there, D...? I remember looking at an old oscilloscope in a junior high friend's garage, and a lot of the names of people I only hung with for less than one year. I wonder how many names I could write down of people I've met in my adult life? Could I write a blurb about each one I spent more than a few minutes with?

What I find is that we remember humans more easily than things, yet humans are the most complex entities in memory, are they not? They are networks, connected to other networks with so many attributes. Each person has different attributes with different values for each of those. If you had to put together a database of humans with a level of detail sufficient to show their uniqueness, how much memory would you need?

Enough reflection. What's for dinner?

I registered for Facebook in January 2007. I can't find the exact date I asked to leave, but it was probably later that year, around October. Much to my surprise, Facebook had no way to actually delete an account, you could only deactivate it. That meant, you couldn't log in but your data, all photos, anything you'd ever posted was going to remain with them. I emailed Facebook about this and was told that it was "very complicated" for them to remove my personal data. "You might want to come back." I kept up a two-week discussion with Facebook which ended with them claiming to have removed all of my data, although I have no way of knowing this was true.

I believe today, three years later you can delete your account, although I still don't know what happens to your data. I do know that Facebook, while it may be fun and even useful, is not what I want. Without going into a point by point, I don't see the benefit of adding a stream of personal data to a corportate entity so they can make money (which they need to do to stay in business) by selling it to other commercial entities. I don't feel the distractions of popup suggestions as an advantage to me. I'd much rather have friends tell me specifically what they're doing, and discover things serendipitously by talking to people and using my own prejudices filters that give each friend a credibility weight.

Here is why someone else says he canceled his FaceBook account. Quote: "a large part of what I have to do on Facebook now is adapt to their changes on their terms. This is unacceptable to me, especially when I don’t see the website adding significant benefits."

As soemone who has followed technology since a very early age, I love the idea of always being connected to multiple streams of communication, yet a don't get a good feeling from Facebook. Quite the contrary, I see Facebook as a huge, very media-rich forum of the kind I abhor in the wine or tech world.  I realize many people love it, including some who are far from newbies or technophobes. What I also observe though, is that the most clueless people I know are big on Facebook and they love friending a large number of people without regard to quality.

I think the number of very close friends, the ones you'd do almost anything for, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The next wave might have between 10 and 50 people you know well. When tese numbers get into the hundreds and thousands, it isn't Dunbar's number that worries me, it's the fact that it becomes CRM or in this case ARM: Acquaintance Relations Management.

As a kid, I was ostracized and hung out with other "misfits" of
society. Several of these have gone on to do pretty big things, like
signing Prince to his first contract, producing and recording big
names in the music business, founding important and flourishing tech
companies to name a few. All of us share one thing, we didn't follow
the crowd and so were classified (in high school) as uncool nerds.

Decades later, what comes out clearly is that the nerds have mostly
accomplished interesting and sometime important things, where the
followers who dressed in the latest fashion (remembering my cuffless
pants makes me squirm a little) and were so cool have mostly not done
much. It's important to note in passing that a lot of people who were
NOT ostracized and who were in fact pretty popular also went on to do
great things, but most important to my point is, they weren't above
talking to the likes of us nor did they make fun of anyone.

Humanity will always be full of followers, so many pilot fish around
the leaders, whether this is in the FriendFeed echo chamber, the
Twittersphere or just in high school. If you haven't got the qualities
to dare to differ, you probably won't do as well in life as those who
do. Although I admire Godin's Tribe thing, I also caution people that
the whole thing can also be seen as a pyramid scheme where someone has
to pay (follow) and someone has to lead (be followed).

Pilot fish photo from http://bilder.peter-koelbl.de

The original Chez DiDi http://tr.im/chezdidi
 
DiDi stood for "Discussion en Direct", French for "Live Discussion". At its peak, Chez DiDi had about 2,000 members in France, Canada, Australia, the USA, Belgium, Israel and a few North African countries. For obvious reasons, DiDi is barely relevant today but a few of the original members still meet on a new Laconica version put up a few months ago. The first mention I find on the net is a post I probably placed about it in December of 1997.
 
DiDi began without the need to login but after I woke up to pages of horrible racist posts, I wrote a registration and login system in C with admin tools to mute or delete members. In the 10+ year history of DiDi, the login was never compromised, even though a few people were kicked and desperately wanted revenge.
 
One thing that set DiDi apart was the French language. The French-speaking Canadians were very into the Internet from the beginning, more so even than the French. It was natural then for a lot of Canadian students to join DiDi and chat there much of the day. Once I logged in as admin and found two people having "virtual sex" there, all via text chat.
 
What I was most happy with in the DiDi experience was the "DiDi Party" that was held in Belgium in the late 90's with people coming to attend from France and Belgium of course but also from Israel, Tunisia and Wisconsin. The fact that a little PHP could bring together 20 or so people from these diverse countries was heartening. We also had a few lunches in Paris with people coming from as far off as the US and Australia. Bringing people together was the greatest thing about Chez DiDi, a small social network created in 1996.
 
In the last few days, someone posted on the original Chez DiDi site: "Somone stole your idea! See Twitter.com"

(download)

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