Twitter Authority Firestorm

As often happens during the weekends, another big debate is brewing on Twitter. Loic LeMeur wrote a post yesterday stating that Twitter needs authority based search, where the number of followers influences the search results, sort of like Google’s page rank. LeMeur says on his blog,

“We're not equal on Twitter, as we're not equal on blogs and on the web. I am not saying someone who has more followers than yourself matters more, but what he says has a tendency to spread much faster.”

And Michael Arrington strongly agrees.  Thus, tweets from high profile users like LeMeur (15,000 followers) and Arrington (36,000) will jump to the top and ours will fall to the bottom.  The whole issue started because LeMeur did not want to read all of the 7,000 tweets that were generated by his recent LeWeb conference.  He only wanted to read those of the “important” people.  I’m sure he had no problem taking the money of the unimportant that attended LeWeb.

Several notables have railed against authority based search.

And on the blogs:

1. Bob Warfield first responded with “Let Them Eat Cake”
2. Sarah Lacy wrote “Thank God Loic doesn’t run Twitter”
3. And today Robert Scoble (with his 45000 followers) jumped in with “Mike and Loic are wrong with Twitter search”

I find it interesting that everyman Scoble strongly opposes others in the big follower club and references Warfield’s blog, one of those smaller voices that Arrington/ LeMeur don’t want to read.

Following the discussion, Jon Wheatley and an enterprising team of developers quickly created Twitority, an authority based Twitter search engine.  You can try it out to see what you think.

What are your thoughts about authority based search?  Do you think there is a place for it? Or is it just another bad idea?