"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." - Eric Hoffer

New communication paradigms (telephone, radio, TV, Internet) often make people think that everything is going to be different, but mostly people's behaviors remain the same, and more and faster interconnections make us more herdy.

Empirically, I think the top tier on Twitter is connectors who retransmit and reflect each other. A widely recognized list of 'must follows' doesn't help, but I think if you're not following those central people, you're at risk of being behind, missing something that's in the market. Anecdotally, my experience of getting more involved in social media was thinking I was pretty well informed, and realizing I was missing a lot, and a lot of what made the media and op-ed pages was percolating around blogs and social media for a bit before it popped up in mainstream debate.

If you want to be ahead of the herd, you have to look beyond the most central people and build a network of the sort of 'smart money' that builds bases in ideas. The good news is there's a lot of churn in the second tier. When something like Cyprus happens, or even when someone has a really good insight, good people get really popular really quickly (Pawel Morski [https://twitter.com/Pawelmorski], Evan Soltas [https://twitter.com/esoltas] come to mind). Which is a positive for idea diversity and 'herd immunity.'

Discovering those people is hard, but (shameless plug) it's part of what we're trying to do at Linkfest.com! [https://www.linkfest.com/]