What's With These 20 A-List Twitterers....Too Good For Us?

At the risk of being banished from relations with the Twitter A-List forever, I do find it curious how some of the more popular social media-ites play in the Twitter playground.

Fact- the average ratio of followers-to-following among the top 50 most influential bloggers is 2.8. In the list of people below, they're ratios are well above 8 (with a median of 23).

Rank	Name	Twitter Address	Following	Followers	Ratio
1	Alex Albrecht	alexalbrecht	27	39,114	1448.7
2	Kevin Rose	kevinrose	102	67,102	657.9
3	Heather Armstrong	dooce	60	17,795	296.6
4	Will Wheaton	wilw	69	19,148	277.5
5	Veronica Belmont	Veronica	401	33,696	84.0
6	John Gruber	gruber	239	14,726	61.6
7	Michael Arrington	TechCrunch	488	27,358	56.1
8	John Dvorak	THErealDVORAK	674	31,775	47.1
9	Steve Rubel	steverubel	406	9,706	23.9
10	Fred Wilson	fredwilson	304	7,152	23.5
11	Evan Williams	ev	881	20,319	23.1
12	Nick Douglas	nick	260	5,926	22.8
13	Dave Winer	davewiner	722	12,037	16.7
14	Justine Ezarik	ijustine	1,481	24,065	16.2
15	Brian Solis	briansolis	527	6,742	12.8
16	Pete Cashmore	mashable	1,501	13,758	9.2
17	Amber Macarthur	ambermacarthur	1,719	15,675	9.1
18	Gary Vee	garyvee	1,856	16,806	9.1
19	Dave McClure	davemc500hats	734	6,499	8.9
20	Hugh Macleod	gapingvoid	1,004	8,417	8.4

Although I might find it praiseworthy that these power users and social media celebrities have embraced so many participants, but there does seem to be a lack of communal reciprocity at play here.

So what's the excuse for being attention hoggers that love the fanship but can't or won't reciprocate. Hmmm...

- Are they too busy? Perhaps, most of these people are fairly professionally active and gamefully employed.  Here's where the "too busy to notice" argument falls down. The average amount of Twitter updates among these members is over 3,700. If they have time to broadcast that much content, they have time to discover others too. 

- Is it too difficult to keep track of the larger group of followings? Yes, it may be difficult, but the majoity of these people have advocated for companies"open up to the conversation" - it does not appeear that theya re practising what they preach personally.

- Is there ego involved? Although I know some of these people personally and think they are great people,  A-Lister bloggers/twitterers have a healthy dose of narcissism and the group above, for all their merits, likely exudes some of that A-list swagger and social media superiority complex. Watch for the comments of Will McCinnes.

"A-listers don't work for me in Twitter - too noisy, too newsy, too me-me-me - my favourite people in Twitter belong to

Brighton

or to the social media (inc. tech PR, enterprise software etc) melting pot, my real world communities"

So are we right here?  Are Top Twitterers suffering from a detached malaise of broacasting content  from their A-framed glass houses. Perhaps as others have done, we should cull the non-participants and only connect to people who build conversations not merely traffic.