I just got followed on Twitter by someone who has 10,000 followers, bringing my follower total to a whopping 60-something.
So who is more popular on Twitter: the guy with 10,000 followers or me with 60-ish?
I don't think there is enough information here to answer the question.
I'm following about 100 people, a mere 1/10,000th of Ashton Kutcher's herd as of a week ago. I only follow people whose comment streams are of interest to me. I also follow people who follow me, but only if I know them and they qualify as interesting (I'm sure there are a handful of people who have followed me that I am unintentionally not following - sorry about that and wow is this sentence confusing me).
The guy with 10,000 followers is following like 40,000 people. That's a lot of Tweets. The guy found me after I started following someone famous. He's looks like someone who is just trying to hoard reach so he can blast out junk. He's a Twitter spammer, which I'll call a Twatter (thanks Jon Stewart!).
So who is more popular, me or the Twatter? Or instead of 'popular', who is more *interesting*?
I think that someone really smart could build a system to answer this by calculating people's interestingness score using Twitter data. Some of that data would include:
1) # of people following you that you aren't following back (# one way fans)
2) # of tweets re-tweeted, or % of posts re-tweeted (syndication factor)
3) Negative score for # users blocking you as a % of total people you follow (spam factor)
and all of these scoring factors would be weighted by
4) the popularity of the people following you, blocking you, or re-tweeting your stories, as measured by the above factors.
It's like PageRank for people.
To avoid the circular reference in 4 you could see the system with a few preset popularity scores for people like @ev and @biz.
Interestingness score could be used as a proxy for reputation. If there was a service that could calculate a person's interestingness score on Twitter, and make it publicy available... there are loads of cool things you could do with that data:
- Show me all news links sent to me by people with reputation scores >5.
- Don't show me any Tweets from people with reputation scores <1.
- Mark any email sent from someone with reputation <1 as a spam.
- Show me the most interesting people in the world of entomology.
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