Take services like Twitter or Friendfeed, for example. Scoble and Calacanis et al. have these huge following/follower counts, and while I know there are a certain number of positives to this, these top users don’t ever get to use these services for what they are intended to do. These guys don’t actually use Twitter for sending out status updates to friends, and I doubt they ever make any lasting friendships out of them.

While Brightkite is floundering a little of late, it is another perfect example of this A-List effect. Could you imagine Scoble and his 30,000-odd followers actually using Brightkite for seeing where friends are and meeting up locally? No, instead their phone/web interface would be flooded with updates that they more than likely don’t care about.

Having these crazy number of relationships on these services basically turn them into great big science experiments. While this has its use, I’m happy sticking to using them for their original puporse.

But I guess that is the true beauty of these things – you can use them however it makes you happy.