Why is twitter such a popularity contest? you don't see people bragging about their number of facebook or myspace "friends?

I've studied social networks for years, and have joined and tried many of the social networking sites. I have researched the way people communicate in real life, versus online. I'm even launching my own social networking site.

If a "friend" or a follower is easily obtainable, people will try to obtain a new friend. It can't hurt to have an extra friend, right? Same with followers, and Twitter is no exception to this rule.

Believe it or not, there are some people who have thousands of friends or fans online, and in real life, they cannot possibly have the time for that many friends. Some sites distinguish between fans and friends, whereas other sites just allow friends (I have to accept your friend invitation), and others have a default setting where anyone can follow you. Twitter is the latter, by default anyone can follow you, as long as you are not protecting your updates.In a very easy way, this following can be considered tantamount to bookmarking websites, and in a way it's the same thing, just that you are bookmarking these URLs in a network that provides status updates whenever that bookmark has added an update.

So, if people brag about their "friends," then they are bragging about their bookmarks, just those that relate back to status updates of people. Likewise, since anyone can follow you on Twitter, this means it's not always a real representation of a social graph of real human interaction. Just because I follow you online, doesn't mean we are going out to get coffee everyday, or hanging out on the beach, etc. With Twitter, it's more of a "following" site, whereas people can follow their latest day in and day out activities which they "Tweet," on Twitter.

By default with Twitter, you don't have to approve followers to make them followers, so it's simple to have anyone follow you. A follower can be comparable to a "fan" or someone who is just plain curious about someone. Traditional social networks, versus update or status networks are not about "friends," or relationships, yet more so about establishing and growing a fan base.

The people who brag about their following are those who are usually marketing a product or service. Those are usually people who are using the tool for business, rather than a hobby. So, let's say I am the CEO of Zappos, who has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter.

He can now tell so many more people about Zappos. Even you can follow Zappos on Twitter. Networks that require real relationships have some sort of limitation on proximity, and have a limitation to how many people you can really connect with in real life.

An example of a social network that requires real relationships can be found at a local meetup event, opposed to on a social network that prides itself on virtualization of connections. Many networks exist as virtual networks, because it's easier to do it this way, not because they care network people who they have not met in real life. There is a research study on this, that after 150 friends on a social network, you've reached a limit, and this limit has been coined as Dunbar's number, named after the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

According to the Wikipedia entry: "Robin Dunbar has suggested that the typical size of a social network is constrained to about 150 members due to possible limits in the capacity of the human communication channel. The rule arises from cross-cultural studies in sociology and especially anthropology of the maximum size of a village (in modern parlance most reasonably understood as an ecovillage). It is theorized in evolutionary psychology that the number may be some kind of limit of average human ability to recognize members and track emotional facts about all members of a group.

However, it may be due to economics and the need to track "free riders", as it may be easier in larger groups to take advantage of the benefits of living in a community without contributing to those benefits.

My guess is that only the "Social Media Guru's" are the one bragging about their followers, to them the more followers they have the more successful they are at "social media. " Those are the only people I've seen brag on Twitter.

Because Twitter is more accessible and therefore followers are more easily gained. Several thousand sounds better than 100. Also, 'followers' strokes the ego more than friends.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.