The Noisy Channel

In a post on ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez summarizes “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy“, a recent research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna Gummadi. The punch line should hardly be surprising to regular readers here given my variety of rants on the subject: follower count isn’t great measure [...]

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In “Using Twitter Lists To Judge Influence“, Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Report writes: I think Twitter Lists will end up helping separate the men from the boys when it comes to influence.  In addition to seeing a Twitter users follower count, we can now see the number of other Twitter users who have added [...]

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I just saw this post from a week ago by Andrew Goodman on Traffick asking “Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter?“. Some context: Guy Kawasaki gave a keynote at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference last week in which he discussed the tactics he uses to “use Twitter as a twool“. Of course, what [...]

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I hope that most readers here have had a chance to try out TunkRank. TunkRank is an application Jason Adams built, in response to a challenge to implement a measure that takes a PageRank-like approach to measuring influence on Twitter. To my delight: TunkRank has become  an influential user on Twitter, with 47 followers, a [...]

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A colleague alerted me to Aardvark, a social search service, scheduled to launch during SXSW, that offers users to ask question via instant messenger or email and receive live answers from your social network. Check out recent coverage by John Batelle and ReadWriteWeb. The initial press is quite positive. In particular, ReadWriteWeb compares it favorably [...]

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A few weeks ago, there was a flame war about Twitter authority, and I was all too eager to throw fuel on the pyre. But now that the blogosphere has calmed down a bit, I’d like to propose a ranking measure that I think might work. My apologies if it isn’t original. In fact, if [...]

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I just came back from the monthly NY Tech Meetup, whose theme this evening was “Built on Twitter“. While the meeting was well organized (a testament to Nate Westheimer, who received the torch from Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman, I had mixed feelings about the demos. Everyone is capitalizing on Twitter’s buzz, but so few people seem to [...]

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There’s been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere lately about whether the number of followers a person has on Twitter is indicative of that person’s authority. I give Loic Le Meur credit for starting this discussion. The most popular alternative seems to be to measure how many times someone’s messages are retweeted. I find [...]

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Loic Le Meur wrote a post today arguing that we need search by authority for Twitter. His argument: Comments about your brand or yourself coming from @techcrunch with 36000 followers are not equal than someone with 100 followers. Most people use Twitter with a few friends, but when someone who has thousands, if not tens [...]

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I am a long-time LinkedIn user, and over time I’ve accumulated over 1,000 connections. Most of them are people I actually know or at least have interacted with online beyond “connecting”. You might think that’s a large number of people to have as connections, and that I could afford to have a more selective velvet [...]

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