Who’s a rising star on Twitter?

I just pushed a new feature out, that I think might be kinda interesting. Basically, you can see how people’s scores have/are changing. Are their scores increasing or decreasing, and how quickly? Who’s hot right now?

If you go over to Twitterank right now, you’ll see a new item in the nav bar. For those of you too lazy to actually go there, here’s what it looks like:

The new Rapid Risers feature shows Twitter users whose Twitteranks have increased the most between the last two times their scores were calculated. Right now, it looks like this:

At the top of the list right now is @stephenfry, and the little green number shows you that his score has shot up 335 points per day! Actually, that’s a lie. The maximum score you can get is 300 and there aren’t any negative scores (yet) so clearly his score can’t have gone up by 335. Rather, 335 is the score increase extrapolated out 24 hours. If you want to find out what really happened, click on his user name and you’ll see:

As you can see, apparently his score went up 94 points between 28 hours ago and 21 hours ago. That’s basically a 100% increase. Way to go Stephen. Now, as to why his score went up suddenly, I don’t know. Based on how the algorithm works, I can tell you that a bunch of people suddenly started talking to him, but why that happened, I don’t know.

So why is this interesting?
I think it’s interesting because Twitterank is a measure of “engagedness” and interestingness. If someone’s score suddenly goes up, it means they’ve suddenly become more engaging or interesting. This could also be interesting to the increasing number of businesses and celebrities on Twitter who are trying to directly reach out to and engage the masses. Twitterank, perhaps for the first time, offers them a way to quantify how well they’re doing.

Major Update!

So… it’s been a while. How’ve you been? Me? I’ve been swell. I quit my job. Been chillin’. Trying to buy some land. Y’know, the usual.

Anyway. I recently was roused out of slumbering funemployment of the non-coding kind, and started working on a major revision for Twitterank. I just pushed it live to twitterank.com, so let me tell you about the new stuff… in bullet list form. Mmm bullet lists.

• No More Passwords! – If you have more of a long term memory than I do, you may recall all the brouhaha Twitterank stirred up when it was first launched. It’s a scam! They’z steelin’ ur passwurds!! OMG! Yeah. Well, in case you had any lingering doubts about Twitterank’s intentions, you can stop being so frackin’ paranoid now. The new version will no longer require your password. Instead, it’ll use this thing called OAuth that Twitter has since adopted (yay), which allows me to make authenticated requests on your behalf, without you giving me your password. So yeah, you can keep your stinkin’ password. I don’t want it anyway.
• New Algorithm – Speaking of authentication, the new algorithm works using the public search APIs which don’t require authentication. This means 2 things. First, you won’t see inconsistent scores like you did in the old version. In the old version, there were actually 2 different algorithms being used, one that used your password, and one that didn’t. Depending on which algorithm was used, you might’ve seen inconsistent scores. That doesn’t happen any more. Secondly, since the new algorithm works great with the public APIs, Twitteranks can be calculated for any Twitter user. And that’s what I’ve been doing. The old version had about 90k users in the DB. The new version has something like 2.5 million, and I’m constantly adding people as I come across them. One unfortunate side-effect of the new algorithm is that a lot of people will have lower scores than the old algorithm that used your passwords, because the search API returns less data than the authenticated APIs. But hey, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a huge deal.
• Developer APIs – If you’re a developer and you think Twitteranks might be useful for something, check out the nifty new APIs. I’m still not entirely sure what it’ll be good for, but try it out and let me know. It seems like developers are looking for a good way to weed out spammers and SEO/marketers. While that wasn’t the original goal of Twitterank, I’m considering incorporating some anti-spammer filters to the scoring algorithm, so we might get there eventually.
• Frequent Updates – In the old version, scores were only re-calculated if someone looked up their score. In the new version, scores will be re-calculated periodically. Currently, users whose scores are in the top 10,000 will have their scores re-calculated every day or so. That means the Top 50 list will change at least once a day, which should make things a little more interesting.

And… I guess that’s it. Maybe it wasn’t such a huge update. Oh, but wait! I have one last thing! I really do, but it’s not done yet. So I’ll announce it when it’s done.