Twitter Authority algorithm proposal

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.