1) Grant Shapps (or @grantshapps as he is on Twitter) follows 212 people on Twitter, and is followed by 322. He’s quite popular in Twitter terms, but not very. Jonathan Ross (or @wossy) has 46K people following him. That’s a pretty good following (all data retrieved on February 3, 2009) So Shapps isn’t without Twitter friends.

2) What I’ve been looking at is “peer networks” — that is, groups of people who perform the same role, or who work at the same company or whatever, and whom you might expect to follow one another. It’s interesting to me that all the MP Twitter people I mapped more or less followed one another, and that they all apparently have chosen not to follow Shapps.

3) My suggestion was that this is because Shapps was mostly using Twitter as a broadcast channel; this has changed recently (there has been a flurry of @ messages and replies.)

4) As to “real friends” vs “virtual friends” I wonder whether people have always reacted in this way? Do you suppose that the emergence of the telephone, telegraph, or indeed postal services left concerned technophobes complaining that people who used such services clearly had no real friends?

My friends on Facebook are real people. I think I can say that I’ve met every one of them at some time in the past, and that most of them I’ve met many times. Some of them are my relatives.

This is less true on Twitter; I have never, for example, met Barack Obama. But I have seen him on television, and have found him to be newsworthy. Direct messages from his campaign were (as a result) interesting to me, and offered an insight into how his campaign was progressing.

I’d suggest that your complaint may be the the same as me complaining that the people whom you watch on television or listen to on the radio aren’t your real friends either. Would you take me seriously if I said something like that?