Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways. Sponsor The findings from this research project have been published in an research paper available here on the project’s homepage . How the Data Was Analyzed The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets . In order to collect this massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter’s service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather additional information about a user’s social links and tweets. The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network – the “single disproportionately large connected component,” notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links and tweets. Within that large network of “in-use” accounts, the researchers further narrowed down the data to focus on the “active users.” These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting – it’s possible to have an account and not a screen name?) That left “only” 6,189,636 active users out of the initial 80 million to examine. To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set of the 52 million users interacted with these active users. The Three Measures of Influence After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama, Shaquille O’Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times. Meanwhile, those users with the most “mentions” – not a direct retweet including the original content of someone else’s tweet, but just a casual mention of their name – were celebs. These three measures of influence – followers, retweets and mentions – has surprisingly little overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy. The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area. Examining the 233 “All-Time Influentials” Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on these lists. These were dubbed the “all-time influentials.” Some of these accounts belonged to news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group – it appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase their influence scores. In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn’t reveal an account’s ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe. According to the project’s homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company’s policy. They plan to have an update on this situation – possibly the data itself – by May 2010. Discuss

Here’s an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street. That’s what Lokast , the self-described “disposable” social network lets you do – carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world. Sponsor The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app’s release: Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you’re in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable. According to the press release, the name is short for “local casting”, as opposed to broadcasting, and “aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content.” We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we’d say why not give it a shot? We haven’t made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it. Now, the thing is, we can’t see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don’t think so. For now, though, we’d say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to. Discuss

Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks’ disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today. The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook’s Beacon program that published what users were buying. Sponsor The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a “digital trust fund” that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision: Over the objections of privacy advocates, Facebook will have a seat on the fund’s three-member board. It consists of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who heads the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s public policy director; and writer Larry Magid. While some people are saying that the settlement is unfair in a few ways, Justin Brookman, a senior resident fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology , seemed to disagree. The general contention has been that Facebook will have one seat on the three-member board for the “digital trust fund” and that it was already required to pay money out to promote online privacy, as our own Sarah Perez discussed when the settlement was first announced last October. Brookman said that today’s decision is “a really good settlement for consumers”, explaining that “there are really very few settlements that come up with that type of monetary figure.” He also contended that, while Facebook will have a seat on the board, it will be a minority member, as a majority vote requires two out of the three parties to agree. He said that the other two members, Hoofnagle and Magid, were both good choices who will act in the public’s interest. “We have a lot of confidence they’ll make wise awards of the money,” he said. “They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out.” According to the Times, however, this may not be the end of the appeal process. One privacy advocate said he was exploring whether he could appeal the decision. “This sweetheart deal for Facebook is outrageous and another indication they don’t really want to ensure privacy online,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. Brookman noted, however, that a settlement like this for privacy issues was relatively unprecedented. Discuss

It’s human nature – we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the previous version of a product. Sponsor Anyone who uses Facebook knows that even the slightest changes in UI or the shuffling of features can create a cacophony of public outcry in the form of “I Like The Old Facebook Better!!” groups. But the interesting thing about those groups is that they eventually fizzle out and people get used to the new version of the site. Change takes time. So what are startups to do when an updated version of their product or service sets off a firestorm of hate mail from previously pleased users? Well, for starters, make sure you’re not taking a Borg-like approach by assimilating customers into submission; forcing things on people never goes over well. Secondly, as crowdSPRING co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky advises, take the time to listen to your users; after all, they are the ones using your product day-to-day and they probably have a few good ideas. “You have to be patient, you have to give your customers and your community some room, some time to react, to criticize, to discuss, to debate,” says Kimbarovsky in a recent video blog . “You can’t harshly tell them ‘this is the way it is and that’s it’, because it will close off communications and make it sound like you don’t care what they say.” There also may be a chance to bring about the change gradually as to not upset your customers with sudden drastic changes. Kimbarovsky recounts an example in which eBay wanted to change its background color from yellow to white, so instead of flipping a switch, they slowly changed the background to a lighter shade of yellow day-by-day until the background was white. But for the most part, changes can’t always be long and drawn out like eBay’s color choices, so Kimbarovsky simply says to engage with your customers when they react and let their voices be heard. “After a short amount of time, if your change is good, if it’s reasonable and if it’s meant to improve as you believe it is, then your customers and your community will understand it,” says Kimbarovsky. “And if it’s not, then you will understand that it just isn’t working.” Discuss

Remember when Jesse James was competing on Celebrity Apprentice , and Donald Trump called him out because he wasn’t calling on his high profile contacts (especially his movie star wife Sandra Bullock ) during the show’s  fund-raising challenges? Well, now that Jesse and Sandra Bullock’s marriage trouble is the biggest celebrity story in the news, a Radar Online source is supposedly shedding some light on Jesse’s decision to leave Sandra out of  Celebrity Apprentice. The former boss and confidant of Jesse’s supposed mistress Michelle “Bombshell” McGee told Radar, “[Michelle] told me that Jesse’s marriage to Sandra Bullock was for publicity, and that’s why he did Donald Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice . He never called on Sandra for money or influence because their marriage was a sham she said.” We don’t know if we can believe the ex-boss of the mistress of the married reality star, but this whole Jesse cheating scandal is disappointing to say the least. Did reality TV fool us into thinking the Monster Garage star was this great guy when he’s really a fame-whoring user? Say it ain’t so! Also see: Sandra Bullock and Jesse James Marriage Profile Did Sandra Bullock Marriage Trouble Affect Jesse James’s Performance on Celebrity Apprentice? originally appeared on About.com Reality TV on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 12:45:43. Permalink | Comment | Email this