Google’s new social network Plus released a suggested users list today and I’m on it. Here is Alex Howard’s post detailing all the people listed. We will all now get tens of thousands if not millions of new subscribers to our updates on the network. We will have all the more incentive to keep posting to Plus and to say nice things about it. Those of us who make money doing these sorts of things, as I do when people click my links and view the ads on ReadWriteWeb or consider my consulting services through this site, will probably see a windfall of thousands of dollars. At least. For some new media brands, if Google Plus gets as big as Twitter, it could mean millions of dollars.

Is this a case of the rich getting richer, of the new media ecosystem being concentrated into the arms of a small number of voices, contrary to the interests of consumers? If this was the only way to discover new people to follow, that would be bad. It isn’t and it won’t be though. Like all things, this arrangement is part meritocracy, part democracy, part privilege and some other parts other stuff. It’s complex and there’s more to discuss about it than I can here while I’m riding down the highway on an Amtrak bus and blogging on my phone.

Is this ethically wrong? I don’t think so, but it is sticky that’s for sure. Networks of self-published content are the hot currency of the era and the ecosystem around those networks includes some of us interesting enough, culturally safe enough and commercially viable enough that we make our living publishing on the web, through RSS, to subscribers on Twitter, Facebook and Plus. It’s a beautiful thing, but the challenge will be to not get so cozy with the networks that we both cover and that deliver us this flow that we no longer serve our audiences (or whatever you people reading should be called) with an eye for critique of the network providers themselves.

I’m not on Twitter’s suggested user list but my employer is. I’ll rip into that company at a moment’s notice, publish its secrets when I discover them and just generally maintain a respectful antagonism with them despite their role in the supply chain that turns my thought into bits into (delicious Oregon microbrewed) beer in my belly.

Hopefully Plus didn’t just buy a bunch of unconditionally supportive new friends in the media. Clearly they don’t hold a grudge about my scoop of the details about how the new network would work at SXSW, despite the red-faced shouting at me at the time. I’ve also been very critical of Plus regarding the Real Names policy.

There’s room in my head though to be glad to have been picked for the pickup basketball team while also feeling like the captain of the team sometimes acts like a frat-boy a-hole. It’s a complicated situation and no one is pure and good in it. It’s the future: messy like the present and the past but hopefully a little more just and democratically empowering.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll be disclosing that I’m on the Plus suggested user list in every article I post about the network in the future. Because these days, a free pile of social network connections equal free discourse at scale, free access to answers to many of my questions and other resources that eventually translate to free money and power. And I intend to keep it free because I’m going to work hard to not pay the price of my integrity.

Dear Friends, I would like to test out a new app called Qidiq, which will let me send you push notifications and emails when I have a question I’d like to survey you about. I’d like to ask people about tech news coverage questions. I can’t imagine I’d send a push notification more than 3 or 4 times a week max – it should be fun. I hope you’ll try it out with me; then I’ll review the app on ReadWriteWeb.

Thanks for your help!

Peter Delevett of the San Jose Mercury News did some research tonight and got specific numbers on Twitter’s widely discussed mega-round of (even more) venture capital. Specifically, $800 million. Delevett says it’s the biggest VC round ever and while I’m not one to say authoritatively that the Merc is wrong about something VC related (they are experts on the subject) it does seem like a bold assertion to make: “the biggest ever.” A WSJ report by Scott Austin last January offers 3 examples of larger investments, including Groupon, Clearwire and the poor risk-takers-gone-wrong at Western Intergrated Networks, who turned $900m of investment into $12m in sold assets a few years later.

There are probably other examples and as people are telling me on Twitter – it really depends on your definition of Venture Capital.

Why It’s Smart

Regardless, I think that if anyone is going to break a record on funds raised, it’s ok with me that it’s Twitter. I don’t have the time or knowledge to put together a whole post about this on ReadWriteWeb, so instead some notes here.

* Twitter has revolutionized business and public communication in a historically unprecedented way. Never before has it been so easy for anyone to publish quick updates about what they are doing and for that to be read and passed around at scale, in real-time. That’s a really, really big deal.
* Businesses are scrambling to get to Twitter’s advertising products faster than the company can deliver them.
* Twitter comes up with really smart ways to do what it does, like its latest ad product – letting brands pay to have their Tweets show up at the top of the page any time someone who already follows them visits Twitter.com. That’s brilliant.
* This whole thing is just beginning. Twitter’s just beginning, but “social media” is all the more just at its beginning. At least, if you were someone with a huge amount of money made from the old economy, and if you could afford to gamble it on what appears to be a new economy emerging, to make a very serious bet seems like a respectable strategy to me.

Half of that money, reportedly, is going to buy out the hippies that created Twitter, leaving them wealthy enough to go innovate some more, possibly kicking off a PayPal-like wave of new world-changing startups.

The rest of that money is going to go, apparently, towards making Twitter all the more solid, important and ready to be the AT&T to Facebook’s Verizon and Google Plus’s Sprint, or whatever. These could well be the communication platforms of the future though, so I don’t think it’s stupid at all to throw a whole lot of money into them. If you’ve got it. And Digital Sky Technologies, the giant Russian company that’s put comparable sums into Facebook, Zynga and other companies has it. So why not?

This really isn’t my area of expertise, though, venture capital. Maybe there’s good reason to freak out – but I haven’t heard it yet.

My old favorite web service for turning a list of feeds into a bulk-importable OPML file has recently gone offline but today I found this one: http://reader.feedshow.com/goodies/opml/OPMLBuilder-create-opml-from-rss-list.php

Oh does that make me happy. I found a list of the top 25 business web app startups or some such thing today and of course I sent the link to Fancyhands, asking them to go grab the RSS feeds for each of those companies’ blogs or press releases. They did so, like magic, then I plopped those puppies into the form on the page above. It’s a simple function to perform, but it’s a nice time saver. Now I’m ready to subscribe to them all and keep up to date with important developments in those companies. Thanks, Internet!