The study by DDB reveals that two in five brand followers surveyed are not interested in engaging with Facebook pages after a marketing engagement ends.

And yeah, the raw number's interesting for about three or four seconds. But it says nothing about how you engage with those people (assuming they're people, and not bots - which can be a big assumption), or how they engage with you.

That said, having just discovered I've lost three followers in the last half-hour, I have to go wail alone in the closet.

More Noise to Signal.

In a hyperlinked world, where our activities, interests and social connections are naked to the world by interlinked web document, the factorial of that number of connections represents the universe of possibilities for analysis, feature development and added value.

Is this just the tip of the iceberg for Twitter? Should third party app developers be concerned that Twitter is slowly going to replace popular add-on features with tools of their own? It wasn't long ago that Twitter snatched up atebits, developers of the Tweetie iPhone app, which has since been rebranded as Twitter's official app. As Twitter expands it's base functionality to include more tools, some third-party developers may be nudged aside.

It is unlikely, however that Twitter would go to the trouble of over-developing on its own platform. Twitter has prided itself on its simplicity since its launch, and by creating too many tools it could ruin that delicate balance of simplicity and functionality. This is precisely why the mutual follow feature, like many before it, is being tested on a small sample size before being rolled-out to the entire population of users.

The same public link connections that make this new feature possible is what makes more advanced social graph analysis possible using tools like Mailana or Twiangulate. Those 3rd party services, while incredibly useful, will likely remain outside the realm of what Twitter would ever develop itself.

Photo from dacort on Twitpic.

It worked much better than I expected! I've grown from 25 followers to more than 2,700 in three days. This places me in the top 10 most followed Google Buzz users, ahead of Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Orli Yakuel and Adam Hirsch.

The Power of Friends

There is a thriving and active community on Buzz. The most followed user is currently the social media blog Mashable, with 17,000-plus followers. Many of the early adopters seem to have already made the switch, to the point that I've noticed a significant drop of activity from friends on Twitter.

When I started using the service and saw that I only had a handful of contacts, I was quite disappointed. No matter what I posted, I received very few replies. It was like talking in a vast ocean of emptyness.

I wanted to see what the service was really like, and decided to engage as many users as I could. I thought this would be an interesting experiment, and also felt very excited by the idea of joining a new community, especially if I could become one of the first power users.

I find it very difficult to communicate on Twitter. To me, it often felt like a one-sided discussion, where superstar users with an agenda would promote their company or consulting business - basically, a competition to get retweets and @ mentions. Most of my attempts to have smart discussions were either constrained by the character limit, the fact that you would only see the latest messages, or the lack of threaded comments. In a way, Twitter is very much about right now, which makes it difficult to keep track of.

I remembered how in the early days of Twitter, Robert Scoble followed every user who followed him, which brought him a lot of users. As many power users know, Facebook has the 5,000 friends limit, and Twitter has the 2,000 user limit, which gets lifted after some time. Buzz has no such limit at the moment.

So I set myself the very daft and unrealistic goal of being to Buzz what Robert Scoble is to Friendfeed. As I learned this weekend, following several thousands of people is a valid strategy to engage a large amount of users, but it is also a double-edged sword. There is of course no way anyone can actually follow that many people. This is a shame, as there are some users whose updates I care about more than the others. This would be fixed with the support of groups or lists, however.

Approximately 10% of the people you follow will follow you back, even if they don't know you. Interestingly, these users will engage in the discussion, comment, and like your stories, much more so than on Facebook and Twitter. However, this could be due to the novelty aspect.

I appreciate the service much more now that I have a considerable following. There is always someone who will be interested in what I post, what I care about. In my opinion, this is true social media.

Come join the ReadWriteWeb team on Buzz!

Interestingly, suggested users who already started out with a large number of followers (25,000+) also gained more followers from getting onto the suggested user list.

Profit? Number of Followers Doesn't Equal Influence

Lorica rightly warns that simply having a lot of users on Twitter does not equal having a lot of influence, but given how many Twitter users are fascinated by these numbers (and the number of quacks who spam us with get-lots of-Twitter-followers-quick scams), it is nice to see some good data for what a spot on the suggest user list is 'worth.'

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis, Jolie Odell and Phil Glockner.