Twitterank Creator Speaks
November 14, 2008 · Published By Administrator
Twitterank Creator Speaks
From | Collaboration 2.0 | ZDNet.com and via an alert from Shashi Bellamkonda on his Happenings, advice & other technology thoughts blog in this post: Twitterank Creator Speaks on ZDNet we get some additional first hand information about twitterank.com and the intentions of its creator.
From the original article, Twitterank Creator Speaks, we hear that the author was basically bored, having run out of “Family Guy” epidodes to watch in a hotel room and threw the application together in about 5 hours. The author has also spoken some more on his blog abut the application and has included some interesting facts and a top 50 list, as well as some development background.
The big secret behind how twitterank determines you score is simply that @replies mean something. The tool measures how many people are replying to your tweets.
Louis Gray declared the entire uproar about stealing passwords to be a non-issue by saying …
Today, I checked out Twitterank, just like so many others, and gained a numerical score that may have no value at all. In that process, I trusted the developer and the site with my Twitter login data, and frankly, that’s of no issue to me in any way. As I said the other day, I believe people are inherently good, and if you’re trying to harvest a host of passwords, Twitter wouldn’t be the place to do it in secret by any means. So I have no concerns.
Shasi concludes with the observation that Ryo Chijiwa is trying to measure engagement by counting how many people are conversing directly with the user using @. That may be a useful measure but it also might leave something even more useful out of the equation. I suspect that a new project might be under way soon that uses the current twitterank data in a second generation version which is much more relevant to Google PageRank.
If calculating your twitter rank using version 1.0 simply counts @relies then that is a meager measure of how many people value the opinion of a particular Twitter user. Could a Twitterank 2.0 algorithm take that data and factor in the twitterank of the person sending the @reply as a further measure of what I consider the most important elements on the Internet to measure: Trust and Authority?
Inquiring minds want to know.





> If calculating your twitter rank using version 1.0 simply counts @relies
Actually, the algorithm is slightly more complex than that. It also takes into consideration who the replies are coming from, and how important they are (their twitterank is obviously one possible signal to consider).
Excellent!
So it truly is already using the Authority/Importance elements of the person sending the reply just like PageRank uses the PageRank of the page creating a link to calculate (in an iterative fashion) the PageRank of the page pointed to.
Do you calculate multiple times until it converges or is it a one time calculation based on the current twitterank of the tweeps sending the replies.
Thank you,
Bill Austin