One nice aspect of being in other people’s Fluthers is a numerical approximation of charisma. Ostensibly, most people will not add somebody to their Fluther unless they find them interesting, or valuable, or friendly in some way. One could assume that a person with high lurve but in a low number of Fluthers crafts different kinds of answers (and thus has a different impact on the Fluther community- err collective) than a person with high lurve and in many Fluthers.
Also the ease with which someone can be added to or subtracted from a Fluther implies that the rankings have room to be dynamic and reflect present-day attitudes, rather than holdovers from a long time ago.
I suppose this is a bit like Google Page Ranks. There may be thousands of hits out there, but most people prefer the sites that are linked to by a lot of other pages. Except now it’s the people we can rate.
Thanks Ben and Andrew.
Will there ever be an online database of lurve and fluthers rankings for all to see? Time will tell.