The holiday season is well and truly upon us, and it’s probably fair to say that most people – certainly most business professionals – bring their mobile phones and (probably) laptops with them when on vacation.

Certainly for me, the thought of being completely isolated from the internet is less of a holiday, and more of a prison sentence. This week I’m enjoying a (brief) getaway to Devon, England, and while the beaches are breathtaking and the towns are picturesque, the lack of a reliable 3G connection – or anything resembling free wifi – is driving me nuts!

What about you? Are holidays (note: not business trips) literally about getting away from it all, or are some things like Twitter still super-important? Vote in the poll below to let me know, and then hit the comments to tell us more!

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On July 28, 2010, Ivy Bean, who at 104 was considered the world’s oldest Twitter user, died peacefully in her sleep.

At the time of her death Bean had some 60,000 followers, and for the previous fortnight updates on her condition had been made by friends and family. When she died, it was announced quickly on Twitter and further statements regarding Ivy’s funeral and donations were made for the following week or so.

Ivy’s death received coverage around the world, and while labelling her as a celebrity might be stretching it a little, she was certainly much-loved and a figure very much in the public eye. She had a fan base, and those members were kept informed of her passing.

If you’re famous, chances are your death will be reported on Twitter, whether you’re a member of the network or not. But what about everybody else?

What happens when you die? Is there somebody you can rely upon to let everybody in your social network know what has happened? Would they know what to do if it happened now? Do they have your logins and passwords? Would they know what to say, and who (and where) to say it to?

And how quickly does it need to be said? Serious question: what’s the correct etiquette here? How many updates does the average person’s death need? Should the accounts of the dead ultimately be deleted – Twitter’s own policy says they have the right to do this with inactive users after a certain period of time – or should they be left alone as a kind of digital headstone?

Ultimately Twitter will likely need fresh policy here, but we’ve all seen how badly Facebook handles this kind of stuff.

(Incidentally, if you ever needed another reason to remove any kind of auto-tweeting connections on your Twitter profile, your eventual demise is as good as any. How bad is that going to look?)

As the line between off and online life continues to blur, the same preparations and guidelines we leave in the event of our passing need to be applied to the virtual world, too. It can’t be too long until this becomes a normal addition to any will.

This is perhaps a subject that nobody likes to think about, but it’s a reality, and one that can force itself upon us at any moment. Like you, I plan to live forever, but just in case the worst happens, what preparations can you take to ensure that the people who care about you don’t just think you disappeared?

(And if you think this is ridiculous and your followers wouldn’t care, then you need to find different followers.)

UPDATE: Twitter has some official policy on this, and even offers a facility to backup a deceased love one’s tweets. God only knows how long you can expect to wait for a response, however.

I moaned about Twitter’s new suggestions for you/who to follow feature last week, but despite this I was kind of hoping I was being my (occasional) curmudgeon self and their touted ‘algorithm’ was going to right itself and eventually suggest people I might actually want to follow. You know: interesting people.

No such luck. All week long it’s been nothing but individuals who are either members of the suggested user suggestions list, random verified users and people or brands who have the slightest connection to me because I said something loosely connected about them once. While drinking.

I mean, it’s been accounts like Oprah Winfrey, for Christ’s sake. Not to mention Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, one of whom I have zero interest in following, and the other who I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

And just now Twitter suggested Kanye West.

Kanye West.

Two thoughts:

1. This is garbage, and
2. So is their ‘algorithm’

Thank God for the hide button, but I fear that if I click this any more I’ll end up with Carpal Tunnel. Can’t I just hide the entire lousy feature?

Come on Twitter, you can do better than this. Can’t you?

The number of followers you have on Twitter has always been an ill-advised way to measure status and influence. It looks impressive, but in many cases is not indicative of anything.

If you have 100,000 followers it certainly appears that you’re popular, but virtually everybody can reach that number – all you have to do is follow 101,000 people yourself. The actual value of building a community via reciprocal following is often very low – the network and its members are not (and likely never will be) engaged.

In some cases follow count absolutely is reflective of influence. Many celebrities and brands on Twitter with millions of followers have a huge impact on the infrastructure of the network, and can make and break websites, products and services with well-timed and enthusiastic tweets and recommendations. If you have a hundred thousand followers but you’re only following a few hundred yourself the chances are that you’re somebody who can make things happen.

But where follow count really matters is in how many other people the people who follow you are following.

Let me explain. Let’s say you have a hundred people in your network who are following you on Twitter. If each of those people is following 100 users themselves, this means that (allowing for duplicates) there’s a collective network size there of 10,000 accounts.

Assuming an even world where everybody tweets at a similar pace and has an equal standing, at any given time there’s a 1/100 chance that your message is going to be noticed. This number rises and falls with your perceived importance, and is impacted by other things like time of day, what day of the week it is, what’s on television, news and sport events, and so on.

1/100 sounds pretty bad but it’s actually decent. Imagine if your 100 followers each followed a thousand people. Now, that overall network size has leapt to 100,000 and at any given time your message has a rather humbling 1/1000 chance of being seen.

And if your entire network is made up of mass reciprocal followers, each following tens or hundreds of thousands of users, there’s every chance that your message will never be seen.

If you want your ideas to spread then your message has to be

1. Noticed
2. Understood
3. Shared

The ideal on Twitter is a community where the network is engaged and everybody within it is following no more than a few hundred people on average. And in a perfect world, that few hundred will all be carefully selected and matter, both individually and as a whole.

The tricky part is that this is something over which you have little control. You can’t shape or even really guide the people your followers are following. But you can be a leader in the way you craft your own community, hopefully inspiring others to take a second look at theirs.

The reality is that any retweets or recommendations you’re going to receive from the Twitter top 1000 are going to be sparing at best. And (while it’s always welcome) even a nod from Stephen Fry or Alyssa Milano is only going to get you so far – that spike in visitors is nice, but this time next week nobody is going to remember. Or care.

Of far more importance is consistent and ongoing support and approval from your own network. These people are the key to taking your brand or idea forward and making it spread. 100 followers each following and being followed by 100 people individually might not have a lot of sway, but together they can make big things happen. Again and again and again. All you have to worry about is being remarkable enough to get noticed.

To Twitter’s credit, they keep trying stuff like this. Unfortunately, despite their best intentions, it never really works out how they intended.

Head over to the Find People section on Twitter.com, and click on Suggestions For You. Here’s the word from the official blog.

With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them. Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — “Suggestions for You”. The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You’ll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click “follow”; if you don’t, click “hide,” and we’ll try not to suggest that user again.

I tried this, of course, and was presented with the usual suspects – about half a dozen people I’d long since unfollowed, one who had blocked me, several more I have absolutely zero interest in and – ahem – Fearne Cotton. To be fair, they did identify a work colleague I wasn’t following, so well done there.

Perhaps you’ll fair better than I did. However, I’m going to hazard a guess that – much like the ‘people you might know’ suggestions on Facebook (I very, very, very rarely do) – no matter how smart your people are, their friend-finding algorithms are never quite smart enough.

Relationships can’t, and let’s be honest here, never should be identifiable by moving some numbers around a piece of paper. It just doesn’t work like that. And I suspect that’s something we should be really grateful about.

PS. You’ll also find a ‘who to follow’ addition in the top right-hand corner of your Twitter.com homepage. Click ‘view all’ to go straight to your Suggestions For You tab.