twitterank for the rest of you

The original version of Twitterank required a user name and password in order to make an authenticated web service request to Twitter and retrieve data that isn’t otherwise accessible. Understandably, many people were reluctant to enter their passwords in a new 3rd party site, and so far, only a small fraction of twitterers have been twitteranked.

The good news is, I have enough twitteranks at this point, that I can start calculating twitteranks for most twitter users, using only publicly accessible data and previously calculated twitteranks. In other words, you can now get any Twitter user’s twitterank, without any passwords. Take for example, @ev, one of the founders of Twitter. He’s so far been cautious enough to not get a twitterank (or he probably doesn’t care), but wouldn’t you want to know what his score would be?

Now you can find out. Check out these screen shots:

screen shot of new form to get anyone's twitterank

screen shot of @ev's estimated twitterank

Notice that under the score, it says “(30.04% confidence)”. Since the version of the Twitterank algorithm which works without a password uses limited public data, there’s a certain amount of guessing involved. Generally speaking, the higher the confidence, the closer the score should be to what Twitterank would calculate if it had access to the user’s password and can retrieve more data.

In any case, head over to twitterank and start looking up the twitteranks of all your friends who’ve resisted the urge so far. Make sure you let them know how they score too

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