Twitter Authority algorithm proposal

20 mars 2009

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.

  1. Re-twittering relates to the « efficiency » of the original twitt. Not about the genuine authority of its author.
  2. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

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

Here are the results :

twitter-authority

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

What’s your opinion ?

A lire également / Also :

  1. Over 500 Twitter followers… and counting !
  2. Ecouter Twitter
  3. Welcome in a world 3.0

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