PersonRank on Twitter
A few posts ago I mentioned the idea of applying a PageRank-like algorithm to networks of people. One simple application of that idea would be creating a useful measure of popularity on Twitter.
The basic idea would be that a user’s popularity is the sum of popularity contributions of all of his followers, where the popularity contribution is the follower’s popularity divided by the number of people that they follow. This measure is recursive but nonetheless tractable to calculate.
This approach to measuring popularity would probably be more robust than the other ones that are often used, such as the number of followers or ratio of followers to followed.
The measure could also be extended to incorporate tweets, where an @username reference could count as a weighted popularity vote in the same way that a following does.
I know its lame to talk about this idea without implementing a prototype but maybe I’ll get around to that it in a bit.