Guy “I can’t believe somewhat someone bought Truemors” Kawasaki has added yet another subdomain to his endless list of Alltop (what popURLs would be if someone decided to aggregate feeds of all kinds) categories, and this one is the top 100 (or so) “friendsters” on Friendfeed. Its called Frienderati.

As Erick Schonfeld notes, we don’t really know how the top 100 (or so) were put together, but it may have to do with the number of subscribed “friends”, or some other metric. I suspect that it must be this, because *I* am on that list, and by any other meaningful metric, there is nothing about my profile on Friendfeed that is really remarkable, save that I was kind of around when the buzz started, so I have a few people following me.

(in fact, according to this list, there are probably a few bunch that are way ahead of me in terms of numbers)

This is just a round about way of saying that if *I* am on that list, one of the problems with the list is that it doesn’t really measure “interest” or “activity” or “engagement”. I’ve barely put a comment down on Twitter or Friendfeed for months. That hardly qualifies to me to be top 100 in anything these days.

Lists do have a role in the blogosphere (and the internets at large), there’s no doubt about that (or their popularity for that matter — please see Cracked.com, which seems to pay the rent exclusively with lists submitted to Digg) … but I think in all cases, its important to know how these lists are compiled.

In the vast majority of cases, its implicit and understood. in this case, however, I think it’d be interesting to see Frienderati show what kind of factors they’re using in compiling this list. Engagement *should* be high on the list, as an implicit function of how “interesting” or “important” someone is. I’m not sure, however, if it really is, and perhaps, it should be.

(addendum: should I be taken off?  I’m conflicted!  My id says “hell no! take what you can get, and run for the border!”  and my super ego, of course, is slapping the hell out of my id as a result)