I talked with Connie Reece (@conniereece) today about Tweeterboard and gave away some information I haven’t talked about before. You can listen to the podcast and pick up a few details on her blog.
The top-secret algorithmic mojo
The one thing I mentioned that I haven’t talked about anywhere is how the top 100 algorithm works. It’s pretty simple, actually: it’s PageRank. I implemented it in the same way it’s described in the original paper. (I’m no computer scientist, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got it right. Also, I’m hoping that I don’t get a cease and desist for patent infringement.)
The interesting thing for me was applying a solution that works well in one domain (web search) to a completely different one (Twitter conversations). And I was happy to see that it confirmed my intuitions about influence within Twitter–basically that @ replies are the most useful metric so far for understanding who is influential.
Anyway, listen to Connie’s podcast for more details.
February 23, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Tweeterboard doesn’t love me, that’s for sure. It seems to miss much of my tweets and conversations, so i have to wonder a little about the algorithm.
February 24, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Okay, BL, I’ll have a look at your stats to see what’s been missed.
February 26, 2008 at 4:24 pm
The Tweeterboard completely misses hashtag usage, if anything it penalizes you for using!
February 26, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Mark,
TB is capturing hashtags but not using them for anything (for now, as I explained in the last post). Hashtags have *nothing* to do with the TB ranking algorithm.
Gene