Ad verba per numeros

On Twitter and influence...
HOT!
Thursday, December 17, 2009, 04:26 PM
INQ has just released a Twitterati list (their name); that is, a list containing the most influential twitterers. I took notice of this thanks to Zee M Kane who, according to that list, is the 7th most influential Briton.

I was curious enough to find how influence was computed and I eventually reached the actual report (PDF). There, in a footprint, you can find that INQ did not actually compute the twitterers' influence but, instead, relied on the Twitalyzer.com service.

Nonetheless to say, Twitalyzer is one of the not-so-many systems to compute a twitterer's influence. Another one is TunkRank which is an implementation of an idea by Daniel Tunkelang. TunkRank is kind-of a PageRank for Twitter and, thus, I find it much more pleasant: I mean, there are not really (or at least not many) ad hoc decisions and its results can be replicated (provided you have a Twitter graph).

Actually, I have assembled such a subgraph (about 1.5 million users) and have applied PageRank (not yet TunkRank) to it, and this is my list of "most influential British Twitter users". But, before, a piece of warning: I've just look for the users appearing in the Telegraph's list and just added Richard Branson which seems to be an odd missing. Now, the list:

  1. stephenfry
  2. mashable
  3. rustyrockets
  4. richardbranson
  5. imogenheap
  6. richardpbacon
  7. calvinharris
  8. andy_murray
  9. mayoroflondon
  10. sarahbrown10
  11. mrpeterandre
  12. tommcfly
  13. zee
  14. suziperry
  15. johnprescott
  16. tom_watson
  17. campbellclaret
  18. dougiemcfly

As you can see, appart of including Richard Branson (and not including some users that do not appear in my sample such as Eddie Izzard) there are only minor, but interesting, differences: for instance, Stephen Fry is more influential than Pete Cashmore from Mashable and the Mayor of London is more influential than PM's wife Sarah Brown; with regards to Tom and Dougie from McFly, Tom is much more influential than Dougie (remember, there are other twitterers in between these celebrities).

Oh, and what about that "contest" between Ashton Kutcher and CNN? It seems that both, aplusk and cnnbrk, share the first place of Twitter influencers. Yup...


Back Next