

Show HN: Bored last night. 3 hour project: Your Most Followed Followers - mittermayr
http://www.fruji.com

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citricsquid
Apparently a few large followed accounts follow me that I wasn't aware of,
neat application...

An idea I've wanted to do for a long time (but isn't technically possible) is
to analyse the _reach_ a user has. For example, when I tweet normally it is
sent out to my ~520 followers, but what about when my tweet is retweeted? What
about how many are active and the chances that they saw the tweet? It would be
really interesting to see stuff like that.

Side note, can you explain "VIP Factor?" I assume it's where you position in
their follows (longer that they've followed the higher the score)?

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mittermayr
VIP factor currently is just: how many followers does a user have : how many
does he follow?

but this needs tweaking, since, if a person follows 10000 and has 10000000
followers, you are still a nobody, being followed by them. i guess i need to
figure out a curve for that.

anyways, thanks for the kind words.

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PeterWhittaker
Cool, but one quibble: You need to make it obvious right up front that cookies
must be enabled on your domain for this to work (not sure why this is needed,
but...).

I block all cookies by default and got all the way to the end of the process
only to discover nothing. Nothing! (Kudos for handling failure gracefully, at
least the app didn't blow up, everything looked fine - but anti-kudos for not
detecting that the process wasn't working.)

When I enabled cookies on fruji, ta-da, it worked fine. Turns out I'm not very
important, sigh. :->

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herval
I imagine MOST webapps out there are basically broken for you, no?

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cyborg
Great work, one problem:

How influential someone is should be a function of #followers and #following -
not just #followers. A high #followers/#following is what really indicates
influence.

Most of my top 10 were people (or biz accts) that had followed 60k people and
hence have a lot of followers.

Edit: Just noticed the VIP factor, which does exactly what I'm suggesting.

~~~
mittermayr
yeah, exactly, that's the vip factor. although, even that number is not
perfect, since a lot of high-follower accounts also follow a high number of
people (in the hundred thousands), which does not make you VIP for being
followed. so i'll have to figure out a curve on this one I guess.

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tibbon
That's pretty cool. How did you get around the issue that you have to issue
that you have to do an API call for every follower to get their details
(quickly outstripping the number of API requests the average person has)? Or
at least, that's how you had to do it prior.

Unfortunately, the information it gave me wasn't helpful: @BarackObama,
@TwitPic, @Schwarzenegger, @WholeFoods, @Starbucks, @zappos, @threadless,
@imogenheap, @charitywater, @ijustine

Basically, I have a handful of big companies and politicians following me. The
only one I've met a handful of times personally and had any interaction with
is iJustine.

~~~
mittermayr
You know iJustine? Congrats :)

Regarding your point: Yes, as discussed in other parts of the comment section,
I believe that tonight I'll take some time and implement a feature that allows
you to hide people who have a ton of followers, and also, follow a huge amount
of people ... which basically, doesn't mean anything to you then. so this
should address the issue.

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helen842000
Hey, I'm part way through building a very similar project with a few extra
paid for features!

Congrats on getting your site launched in such a short time!

It's an interesting aspect to analyse your own network.

~~~
mittermayr
go for it, just make sure you let those pay who do this professionally, and
those who are curious should have access to full functionality albeit a
limited set of result rows maybe or something like it. i really hated all
these twitter services who make me sign up do a bunch of things and then tell
me to pay or not see any results. let us know when you go live :)

~~~
helen842000
Will do! Mine is more from the angle of looking at most followed people in
your secondary network (friends of friends) finding 'popular' and relevant new
people to follow as I think the Twitter site is terrible at helping you to
find & follow quickly.

I agree that for the most part these services should be free and simple and
the paid features are to help the pros.

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pors
Very nice! You could improve it by filtering out accounts that follow a large
number of others. Many of the real VIPs have many followers, but don't follow
that many themselves.

~~~
mittermayr
exactly, responded to that point twice within the comments here somehow - this
needs a drop-off curve or something, where, if a person who has >100.000
followers, but follows less than say 500, it means you're seriously VIPed
right there :)

------
mittermayr
QUICK UPDATE: I have added your feedback to the site now! You can filter out
the auto-follows and get your REAL, HONEST followers only now as well in a
separate chart.

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mittermayr
thanks guys for checking this out. i wanted to post this before going to lunch
(european time), and now this. there's hundreds of people on the site right
now, and i can't go to lunch, uugghg, internet!! :)

p.s. feedback is heavily welcome, i am happy to add a few things and maybe
post the whole thing on github or something if anyone needs a quickndirty
starter for twitter integration apps.

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AshleysBrain
Great work! Always wanted something like this and wondered why Twitter didn't
have an option to show you this kind of info. Nice idea.

~~~
mittermayr
right?? i couldn't find this anywhere, despite a trillion twitter service out
there. i built it for myself, to see some more details, but bootstrap is a
great thing to make a little script look awesome in an instant, so i figured
why not post it.

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jarin
It looks like I managed to follow several huge celebrities back when they
auto-followed you back :)

~~~
mittermayr
:) yeah exactly! i was wondering if I should add an option, to not include (or
maybe hide) accounts who obviously show high auto-follow-back rates, i.e. a
low score follower/following

------
mittermayr
also, if anyone is curious, all UI is done by bootstrap
(<https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap>), added some simple php for the
twitter crunching (using twitteroauth) and that's it.

~~~
tibbon
Can you put it on Github? There's one thing I'd like to see how you're doing
it logic-wise.

~~~
mittermayr
ask, what part?

------
mittermayr
i've decided to live-stream my analytics account, so you can see yourself
making an impact :) <http://livestream.com/mittermayr>

------
mittermayr
would you say people would pay a dollar to see their top 50 followers? just
curious...

