Tyler Cowen points to an article about a guy who’s selling his Twitter account with 1500 followers on ebay. The auction is here and the current bid is a bit over $1500, i.e. around $1 per follower. To me this seems kind of high and is most likely affected by the publicity that this is getting. Certainly I wouldn’t pay $1 for a Twitter follower, especially not someone who’s originally chosen to follow someone else.

Anyway, it kind of illustrates how the flow of information is becoming increasingly decentralised. In the olden days, it used to be fairly obvious who the important sources of information were — major news organisations for the most part. To a large extent this is still true, but it’s changing rapidly. The old cliché about it’s not what you know but who you know that matters is becoming ever more true. The Internet reduces the cost of communication so much that economies of scale in information collection and distribution (e.g. that newspapers have) are a lot less important. In some sense this makes life harder, because it’s less clear who you should be listening to and who is a useful information provider. On the other hand there are benefits in that information providers become a lot more competitive.

As decentralisation of information sources increases, I think those who are effective “social hubs” will become more important and more powerful. Hubs centralise and filter information once again, and offset the tendency towards decentralisation. Hubs have both many sources and many followers. For a hub, it is not only who you know but who knows you that are important criteria for success.

Update: ebay have pulled the auction.