

Fresh Twitter data on Infochimps, plus Announcing Trst.me - cwilson
http://blog.infochimps.org/2010/04/27/fresh-twitter-data-on-infochimps-plus-announcing-trst-me/

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m0th87
A few months ago I talked to infochimps (I got their contact info thanks to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989180>)

I asked for a copy of the social graph so I could build exactly the kind of
service provided by trst.me. Joseph Kelly told me I was "on to something", but
they never gave me a copy of the data.

I really hope they had every intention of releasing this service before my
correspondence with them. But after seeing this, the tin foil hatter in me
can't help but get the nagging sensation that maybe I shouldn't have made
public my intention and just gone ahead with my own crawl of twitter. Oh well,
there goes my research project.

~~~
Tichy
Sorry to break it to you, but computing page rank for Twitter followers really
isn't that much of a revolutionary idea. It is, after all, one of the most
successful measurements for rank on social graphs. Ranking apps for Twitter
are popular, so you only have to put 2 and 2 together to hit upon the idea.

I have pondered it myself, but alas, didn't act on it. I am very sure I am not
the only one.

Google already searches Twitter, too, they are bound to use some form of page
rank as well.

~~~
m0th87
Centrality analysis can get much more sophisticated than PageRank (which is
why Google uses PageRank only as a part of their overall search relevancy
computation). But even exposing something as trivial as a PageRank for twitter
is extraordinarily valuable for a number of use cases, especially since,
AFAIK, no one has done it before.

~~~
Tichy
Nothing against PageRank or whatever analysis, I just thought it a bit wild to
suspect that infochimps stole your idea.

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cwilson
I suggest reading the blog post but here is a direct link to the app as well.
Really cool!

<http://trst.me/>

~~~
Jitle
The color data is very interesting. My Twitter app uses the color from users
profiles to stylize their individual tweets to their followers. It adds a lot
of personality and breaks up the black/white monotony.

Feel free to give it a try - <http://loritweet.com>

