Pune’s 20 power twitterers

So twitter launched lists and many believe these will be a new mechanism for computing reputation instead of the current defacto followers. It is not a restricted knowledge that using follower counts as a measure of effectiveness of twitter is a extraordinarily error prone and brave exercise due to the obvious. Given the appearance of twitter lists, I was keen on figuring out if there is a way to reasonably measure effectiveness of a twitter id. This post details the exercise I went through. While there could be discussion around the exact semantics of such a computation and whether the results are consistent with everyone’s expectations, let me assert that I find the result sufficiently superior to anything else I’ve seen or I’ve been able to imagine so far. And that may stem from or despite the fact that two of my twitter handles (@dnene and @d7y) feature in this list.

As an input I took the top 50 handles from pune from twittergrader.com. Why top 50 ? Only part of the process was automated – the remaining required manual input. I did not want to spend too much time on doing data entry. This also gives you the twitter grader grade. I subsequently looked at the reputation of the handle in Klout, looked at the lists which included the handle and finally also looked at the twitter rank as expressed by yet another site twitter-friends.com. I computed rankings using each of these. I finally created a sum of all the ranks, and create a composite rank based on the sums. The interesting aspect of this computation was not just the end results but also some of the intermediate results.

So without further ado – here’s what I found

Ranked as per twitter grader

The rank based on followers or twitter grader ranks was not well correlated with the other ranks. In my mind there is a sufficient rationale to question the effectiveness of both followers count or twitter grader as an ability to reach or influence or engage with others, even though twitter grader grade is slightly better than a folliower count. Thats why the other ranks turned out sufficiently differently ?

Ranked by Klout

To my lay reading this had a stronger emphasis on people who engaged with others, were conversational and had a high update count as well.

Ranking by Twitter Lists

To me this reflected not the spread of the following as much as the strength of the following. Notice how @sandygautam who very tightly focuses on psychology and is well respected twitterer in that area moves to the top (in a rather dominating way I might add)

Rank using Twitter Rank computed by Twitter-Friends

This is an interesting metric and while I couldn’t help clearly identify what drove this, would be certainly willing to lend a ear if you want to come up with a suggested rationale.

So the final 20 pune power twitterers based on a composite of the 3 metrics, which in my perception is not terribly different than a list that I would come up with using my gut feel (though perhaps with different rankings) is …. drumroll … drumroll ..

Pune power twitterers

Note : All the computations results are visible in the attached PDF. Also in a few case klout ratings or twitter friends rankings were not available. In such cases I have applied a klout rating of 0 and twitter friend ranking of 999999. Obviously it reduces the probability of such handles appearing in the overall rankings substantially – but there was no other reasonable option I could think of.

Disclaimer : At the end I am certain there can be a number of views on how such an exercise could be conducted. There might even be some complaints. Being aware of that, I list results of what I believe to be a “fair” exercise. Whether it is a “just” exercise is left to the reader. Also be aware that I have two of my twitter handles in the list above. You may choose to believe my assurance that I did not tweak the logic based on a first pass of results – the logic I decided to apply was not changed once the results were visible.

Written by Dhananjay Nene

October 31st, 2009 at 12:00 pm

Posted in Current Affairs

Tagged with influence, reach, reputation, twitter

13 Responses to 'Pune’s 20 power twitterers'

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Hey Dhananjay,

Thanks for spending time in carrying out this exercise. It is quite interesting how different sites rank tweeples differently. But the consolidated ranking seems to be the best representation

Arun Prabhudesai

31 Oct 09 at 2:37 pm
hi,

I came to this site following Punetech’s tweet hoping to find interesting tweeps that I could start following. Indeed surprised to see my handle @rkartha as my bio states my location as Kerala/Pune i.e. 2 locations! I am wondering how the various sites like twitter grader, klout, twitter lists compute my ranking considering the fact that multiple locations are mentioned in my Bio.

Will look at the PDF & comment in detail later…The methodology you have followed looks good

Cheers!

RK

31 Oct 09 at 2:37 pm
You should remove users who follow more than couple of hundred users.

Anon

31 Oct 09 at 2:48 pm
@rkartha, if the word “Pune” is there in your location (even as a substring), I think most graders will include you in a list of twitterers for Pune. So, you’ll probably show up in Pune’s lists and in Kerala’s lists.

@Anon, if you remove users who follow more than a couple of hundred users, the entire list will probably disappear. Also, the quality of a twitterer should be judged by the quality of people following him, not by the quality or number of people that he is following.

ngkabra

31 Oct 09 at 3:22 pm
Hi anon,

why do you say so? I follow more than 1000 and try to do justice to all be having multiple columns in my tweetdeck window. What’s wrong with scanning a lot of twitter accounts and scouting for great content? I also subscribe to a lot of blogs in my google reader (that stat is not public) and perhaps the blogs I read is more than the subscribers I have for my blog , but should that disqualify my blog to be placed in a top list?

@d7y gr8 sruff and appreciate all your efforts !

Sandeep Gautam

31 Oct 09 at 3:25 pm
@RK, belonging to both

@anon I understand where you’re coming from. But thats the wrong problem to fix. The right way to handle it is to treat them as being able to provide lesser attention to those they follow. Thus having followers each following tons of people should result in a much poorer network strength than having followers each following only a few people. The impact of those who follow a lot is on the followed not on themselves – since they have lesser attention to spare.

@Sandeep Glad u liked it.

Dhananjay Nene

31 Oct 09 at 6:24 pm
This comment is more abt the list than abt methodology used to construct the list.

What I liked abt the list is – number of geeks on the list. Specializing if we find out how many of the people are geeks+entrepreneurs then that number if very good which I think contributes to the fact that twitter community in Pune at least is more abt tech and less abt social media. Thats a nice thing to have (for us geeks anyways).

BTW – links to twitter account of this elite group would have helped.

sushrut bidwai

2 Nov 09 at 2:07 pm
@sushrut

I wouldn’t read too much into the number of geeks being high – thats probably a function of the fact that a high percentage of twitter users in pune are geeks.

On a separate note whether twitter community in Pune is more about tech and less about social media (or for that matter anything else) is also a little suspect since a lot people in the list do not primarily tweet tech stuff.

BTW – the links are there – not sure how u missed it (they were not there for the first couple of hrs .. but were added soon thereafter).

Dhananjay Nene

2 Nov 09 at 5:56 pm
[...] analyzed who would be Pune’s top twitterers according to a number of different criteria. His he published some results of his investigation on his blog /home/dhananjay, and it is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech [...]

Analyzing Pune’s top twitter users | PuneTech

3 Nov 09 at 9:15 am
Don’t you think someone is missing ? :p

saurabh shah

3 Nov 09 at 12:34 pm
Saurabh,

As with any analysis, I have described the methodology and my perceptions of the results.
The answers are to be found there.

Basically – I did not want to play “god” here in tampering with the results using my judgement.
I hope you find a consistent logic applied without any personal prejudice which is the best
one can hope for under such an exercise.

The input to the exercise was top 50 in : http://twitter.grader.com/index.php?Action=TwitterUsersByLocation&City=PUNE&State=16&Country=IN

So whether I find someone missing is irrelevant.

Dhananjay

Dhananjay Nene

3 Nov 09 at 1:53 pm
Hi Dhananjay,

This is the great and useful stats. Pune is now started noticing Twitter. I think it will be more helpful if you take data from http://twitterholic.com.

Malhar Parve

7 Nov 09 at 5:13 pm
ohh ! i was just kidding …

saurabh shah

15 Nov 09 at 1:00 pm

/home/dhananjay

Pune’s 20 power twitterers

13 Responses to 'Pune’s 20 power twitterers'

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