Denis Florent » twitter

Welcome in a world 3.0

Denis Florent — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:07:51 +0000

I know a restaurant – average italian summer food – with a magnificent swimming pool in the middle. Obviously, through the buzz, more and more people are going there for the pool rather than for the food. Clients made the business shift : it’s now a swimming pool with catering facilities around. Users. Clients. THEY decide. But usually, in the real world 1.0, it would be so complex to radically modify a business that it finally dies rather than changing.

One of the most fantastic aspects of Web (2.0 etc.) companies is that they can completely change their activity type, not according to boring market studies, but following actual shift in their users way to interact with the app.

Remember when Seesmic was a video project ? It’s now the best Twitter desktop (and online) application available. Why ? Because Twitter became obviously more important than video-blogging. And what’s happening to Twitter itself is exactly the same. Remember this page ?

So… it was about « What are you doing ? » (some users actually DO keep on tweeting what they do (I just ordered pizza… My dog is snoring…). There was no search, no trend. But eventually Twitter became so succesful that people used it as their first reflex when something was happening in the world. You would search for Michael Jackson on June 25th 2009. Twitter became a dynamic photography of the world trends. And probably, through this shift (forced by usage), found its future : a life search engine. Google’ing the instant. Watching the world’s vibration.

This is what brought Twitter to release today their new main page :

It’s now all about trends and search. Almost a new model. Users have morphed Twitter. They have decided how they wanted to use it.

1.0 was about publishing.
2.0 was about sharing.
3.0 is about mutating.

Ready ?

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Follow me on Twitter ! http://www.twitter.com/denisflorent

Twitter Authority algorithm proposal

Denis Florent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:01:02 +0000

Are you a follower or a leader ?

Calculating Twitter authority is quite tricky. One needs to make choices on how he understands the word « authority ».

I decided to interpret « authority » in « leadership power ». In other words, I didn’t try to calculate how many people you are influent on (that’s simply your followers number), but to measure your leadership power : the weight of people CHOOSING to follow you ALTHOUGH you are maybe not following them, vs the number of people you follow…

These are the options I took in defining the algorithm :

A. Re-twitts of someone’s twitts are not a relevant parameter regarding Authority.

Re-twittering relates to the « efficiency » of the original twitt. Not about the genuine authority of its author.
On which time frame should these re-twitts be counted ? Last week ? Today ? Last month ? This is far too vague.

B. The number of Twitts is not a relevant Authority parameter.

Using Yahoo! Pipes & TwitterFeed, you can create a giant feed-of-all-feeds and automatically publish hundreds of twitts per day. Does this have something to do with your genuine authority ?

C. The calculation should annihilate Bots.

It means that users with « balanced » accounts (approximate same number of friends and number of followers) don’t have an important leadership. They just have friends. We don’t measure your friendship ability, here :-)

D. Still, the number of followers, even if « balanced » by an automatic following, should have some weight.

Because, even if your followers/friend ratio is balanced, there is still a difference of influence in having 10.000 followers rather than 100.

To test my formula, I included 6 types of test data.

A major Twitter user (techcrunch)
A Twitter user with a large number of followers and who manually chooses who he follows (loic)
A Twitter user with a huge number of followers that he automatically follows (scobleizer)
A Powerful blogger (ourielohayon)
A typical average blogger (denisflorent) – that’s me ;-)
A suite of different theoretical Twitter users with different values.

Here are the results :

These results comply with the way I understand Tribe Leadership Power.

What’s your opinion ?

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Follow me on Twitter ! http://www.twitter.com/denisflorent

Over 500 Twitter followers… and counting !

Denis Florent — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:03:28 +0000

What should I start from ? « Thanks », probably.

A friend was asking me recently what Twitter was about. I must admit it was difficult to answer. This 140-character word is so wide, so amazingly full of possibilities and possible usages… that any explanation is reducing reality !

Did you know that some talk radios are using Twitter to survey listeners during shows ? I will show you how to do this in a next blog post.

So, yes, I have more than 500 followers, and a very small percentage of those are spamming me. The overall quality of received tweets is amazing, and the knowledge-sharing is stunning !

Of course, Twitter, that’s also that friend who was informing us of every pizza he was buying. I un-followed him the day he told the world he was just out of the Dentist’s. That was far much more information than I needed :-)

Twitter is slowly (actually less and less slowly) revolutionizing the way we share information AND knowledge. Get yours, NOW ! And follow me, of course ;-)

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Follow me on Twitter ! http://www.twitter.com/denisflorent

Thank you, dear Twitter followers !

Denis Florent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:33:20 +0000

This is a small tribute to the friends who are following my Twitter updates :-)

If you are not there yet, follow me on Twitter !

Get your twitter mosaic here.

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Follow me on Twitter ! http://www.twitter.com/denisflorent

Ecouter Twitter

Denis Florent — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:26:23 +0000

Chaque jour le net offre une nouvelle manière d’écouter / de découvrir / de télécharger / de la musique.

Or, chaque jour, des utilisateurs de Twitter postent des liens vers des fichiers musicaux. Twisten.fm s’occupe de crawler Twitter à la recherche de ces liens, et vous les apporte sur un plateau. Il ne reste plus qu’à cliquer pour écouter.

Décidément, Twitter devientde plus en plus incontournable. C’est d’ailleurs ce qui a décidé Institutional Venture Partners & Benchmark Capital d’y injecter 35 millions USD. Todd Chaffee explique sur Techcrunch aujourd’hui :

« Our model is to find the winners and market leaders that are going to grow at a disproportionate level. Twitter falls in that category. Twitter is bigger than a lot of people realize and growing faster than a lot of people realize, but it has not hit the mainstream yet. It is just starting. »

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Follow me on Twitter ! http://www.twitter.com/denisflorent