How Many Times Have You Been Favored?

Be kind, Re-tweet. (If you enjoy this)

Google tends to bandwagon jump and over-index the vogue site of the day. Not long ago, every search had some emo kid's myspace page showing up in the top ten results. Then they decided to crawl every Youtube comment ever, and we all know how much utility those have. Now, within hours, your every mundane tweet is searchable.

Simultaneously, people are beginning to realize that number of followers isn't the best indication of influence on Twitter. Any idiot can auto-follow and be auto-followed by plenty of other attention seeking "experts" who aren't really listening. How then, do we truly measure someone's actual broadcast power? By doing what Twitter is all about, listening to what other people are saying.

One way to measure influence is noting how many times a person's tweets have been favored by others. In this disposable real-time world, someone wanting to save one of your 140 character snippets for future reference has a lot of meaning. So, go ahead and Google:

site:twitter.com/*/favourites USERNAME   (note the U in favourites)

where obviously, "username" is yours. You might need to click "repeat and include the omitted results" at the page bottom. Surprised by how high or low the number is? Well don't worry too much - a lot of people don't use the favorites feature to its full potential. Me included because until recently, favoring an update from Tweetdeck was a major pain. It's also noteworthy that some users automatically favor every tweet directed @ them for future reference, especially before the @replies tab was changed to "mentions."

For some types of user, mentions, replies and retweets will be more relevant than the number of times favored. Problem: Twitter's "real-time" search often misses results, doesn't tell you how many results there are, and only goes back about a month. Wouldn't ya know, there's an easy way to measure this too using Google Search:

site:twitter.com/*/status/ @USERNAME -site:twitter.com/USERNAME/status/

Just fill in the relevant username. The first portion searches through status updates which include the user you're ranking. The second is a control to weed out any references to oneself in the third person. :)

Make sure to click "repeat search with the omitted results" if the option is there and voila - a true measure of your influence. For an added "equalizer," use the advanced search page and limit results to a relevant time frame, say, the last month.

While we're on the subject of Googlefluence. @Ev's Twitter profile has a Google pagerank of 7/10. @Scobleizer also is a 7. Like most users, I'm a 4 (@Oprah is too, but likely not for long), and newer accounts range from 0 to 3.

If you'd think when Googling "site:twitter.com" the top results would be the home page, then the most popular (or linked-to) Twitter accounts, you'd only be half right. The first result is the "What are you doing" homepage (pagerank 9), but the second is a seemingly random user, @beeahna (rank 4). With 433 followers and 972 updates, I'm not sure why she stands out (save for alphabetically.) Using the methods outlined above, she has received 36 mentions and been favored 35 times according to Google. She was also the 14,258,369th Twitter account created. Anyone care to offer an explanation on this?

Thanks for reading. Let me know how you measured up. Next post will be: "Conversation Killers - How Twitter Clients Actually Reduce Usefulness"

 

What Were You Thinking? 1000 Tweets.

About to graduate high school and with the new millennium dawning, I became painfully conscious of time's passage. Memories are fleeting. We've a lot of life to live and much of it is reduced to highlight reels: a photo album, a fuzzy memory, the feeling a song evokes. I decided to make an effort to better preserve my experiences.

I kept a journal. I wrote down my thoughts and feelings, what I was doing, what everyone else was doing. I could go back and re-read this later to gain better understanding of where I'd come from and where I was going. I kept this journal for exactly one day.

It still sits on a bookshelf, mocking me. When I open it, I'm ripped through a decade-wide wormhole.  A few times since I attempted to start again, always with the same result. It's near impossible to sit down and write a coherent history of life, so varied and full of stimuli.

Recently I noticed I'm approaching 1000 Twitter updates. There's lots of talk good and bad about the service, so I decided to go back through my tweets from the beginning, to see if I've been wasting my time or actually adding value by sending five or so updates per day.

We're writing our autobiographies, memoirs, commenting on history in real-time. Some future digital archaeologist with a wicked algorithm is going to understand the world we live in now through our tweets. The shortened links may all well be broken, but the soul will remain. It's only a matter of time before a major disaster is live-tweeted by a large segment of a population. Maybe that disaster will be averted by Twitter, who knows.

It's time to realize that this really is a micro-blog, and start using it that way. You may be answering "What are you doing?", but you may one day look back and wonder, "what was I thinking, then?"


 

Design on a Dime


I'm working on a hypothetical program for my local library. It's a Haiku contest where entries are tweeted. As far as I know, there are only 3 people in our town who tweet, including me, so this will be a neat experiment.

I'd like to know how you feel about the design, and do you think it's informative enough for someone who might not know what Twitter or a Haiku is?

 

Game-Changing Moments: the Internet & Me, 1994 - Present

Yesterday I had a nostalgic thought: a flashback to my first conversation on the internet. I actually remembered the name and profession of the guy, looked him up and found him on linked-in. Continuing to think about technology and its future, I've put together a list of my internet turning points.

~1994. I've been playing games like "Doom" on my 486 gateway PC. We keep getting Compuserve discs in the mail. I decide to buy one of those "modem" things at Wal-Mart for $50. After some trial and error, my big brother and I manage to log on and find a chat option. Randomly we're paired with a man named Barry. He works at Coca-Cola. If you're over 25, I don't have to explain the thrill of your first electric conversation with a stranger. Also one of the funniest, unique conversations I can remember. The phone bill was about $300 that month - oops.

Now it's 1996. I like chatting with people on sites like "Talk City." A lot of this conversation revolves around arguments and insulting others. The first web-related commercial I ever saw was for "Talk City" during the Seinfeld Finale. On a whim I don't remember, I download a program called ICQ. I am one of three registered users in my town. In less than a year, every kid in our school from 14-18 will have an account. Suddenly, talking to strangers in faraway places seems mundane and pointless.

August 31st, 1997. I'm in an mIRC chatroom on DALnet, learning how to pirate. Suddenly the chatrooms flood with panicked messages: Lady Di has been in a car accident and is likely dead. I've heard about this story as it happened, instead of hours or days later. The implications for this new "word of mouth" are overwhelming.

Fall 1999. My friend and music buddy comes to school ecstatic. "My dad found this thing on the internet called 'Napster'; you can download a whole song in under 20 minutes as an 'M-P-3.' By April 2000, Metallica threatened to sue me and had my account suspended, all because I searched for "Master of Puppets" a few days prior. Didn't download, just searched. I have never and will never forgive them.

September 11,2001. This doesn't have anything to do with the internet, but I'm telling it. I'm sleeping on the couch, had to work the night before. I let the phone ring through to the answering machine and listen to the message: "I don't know if you've heard or not, but terrorists just took out half of New York City." I roll over; it can't be that big a deal.

2005. I'm thinking of a recipe I made for German Club back in high school - Frankfurter Nudelpfenne. That doesn't yield any Google Results, so I throw a Hail Mary and search for the only three ingredients I remember, "peas, carrots, hot dogs." These three seemingly random words not only yield the recipe on the first result, but a version posted by a woman who'd had the same German teacher, 25 years earlier. Small internet.

January 15, 2009. 3:26 PM. A plane leaves La Guardia airport only to crash land into the Hudson river. By 3:40 PM, it's all over Twitter, complete with rescue pictures. I get to watch it unfold in real-time. Suddenly it's cool to be connected and talking with people you don't know again.

There are lots of points to be drawn out here. Also, a few things I left out, like the first time I used Google, or the results the first time I searched for myself. We'll leave a little something to the imagination. Do you have any "key" internet memories?

 

Is Twitter C-Span?

 This month celebrates the 30th year of C-Span. In 2004, The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network celebrated its 25th anniversary with 25 days of viewer call-in programming. This year I'd be satisfied if they celebrated with just 30 minutes of live tweets with hashtag #cspan across the bottom of the screen.


C-Span and Twitter have had a strange relationship: During the 2008 election, C-Span launched an awesome election/debate hub website with Twitter and blog feeds linked in. That's what actually got me into Twitter. More recently, Washington journal (the morning call in show on C-Span) began reading tweets that were sent @washjournal. unfortunately, I think this practice has been discontinued.


Twitter has grown because it's a public forum for discussion and debate. It seems a logical conclusion that the only national public affairs network would embrace this technology. It sure beats maddeningly listening to a busy signal all morning.




 

Creation Stimulation

Remember the movie Good Will Hunting? In it is a story about a man in a remote hut who became a famous mathematician by deriving advanced theorems from just a simple textbook. That anecdote may have been fictional for all I know, but it illustrates a difference between art and science.

If you never heard music, you would not be able to create it. You would create some wretched cacophony that wouldn't make sense to the rest of our ears. In the same way, if you never experience life, how can you expect to write about it? Lately I've been feeling creatively barren, then I realized my problem was a simple lack of stimulation.

The math genius is able to deduce all the advanced laws because they already exist, merely waiting for discovery. Writing, music, and art on the other hand, are heavily influenced by perspiration and inspiration.

This weekend I took a break from the internet and cable news to spend some time doing real networking. It felt great and I had more ideas than I could keep track of.

I recall seeing an interview with Tom Wolfe (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bonfire of the Vanities, etc.) where he spoke about young writers (paraphrase): There's always the kid who writes that great novel at 23, summing up all their life experiences. A year later, they're writing about a writer who is having trouble finding inspiration and just can't find their voice.

Main point: Stop looking to the mainstream for inspiration. If you find yourself tweeting "thinking of something good to Tweet," you might have the same problem.

 

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