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.