What is twInfluence?
twInfluence is a simple tool for measuring the combined influence of twitterers and their followers, with a few social network statistics thrown in as bonus.
We know that "A-List" Twitterers like Scoble, LeoLaporte, and BarackObama have a lot of influence on Twitter, because they have tens of thousands of followers. However, social network analysis teaches us that there is a "horizon of communication" that extends beyond your own direct contacts, and this is demonstrated whenever somebody "retweets" a message. The significance is that not all followers are equal.
Imagine Twitterer1, who has 10,000 followers - most of which are bots and inactives with no followers of their own. Now imagine Twitterer2, who only has 10 followers - but each of them has 5,000 followers. Who has the most real "influence?" Twitterer2, of course.
As of right now, 73,287 twitterers have profiles analyzed on twinfluence.com.
Privacy and Caches
The Twitter API requires authentication to accomplish a couple of the tasks that twinfluence performs. However, I DO NOT record, cookie, or cache your Twitter login credentials or follower lists - unless you request that I tweet you when a particular user's profile is updated offline, at which point I delete any credentials I have for you. I DO store completed search results and statistics in order to calculate rankings. TwInfluence mostly automates what you could do by surfing twitterers and their followers manually... if you were really, really determined and were willing to add up tens of thousands of network values.
Once a twitterer is analyzed, scores are cached for 48 hours before they will be recalculated in order to keep repeat requests to the Twitter API to a minimum (the cache is increased to two weeks for particularly large twitterers with 30,000 or more followers). Until then, cached values will be displayed even if a new request is made. I try to manually refresh the cache for all top 50 users every two weeks or so.
About The Rankings
Twinfluence calculates two types of ranks - one assigning an absolute rank (#1!) compared to all analyzed twitterers to date, and one that assigns a value and category relative to other twitterers that have more or less the same number of followers as you.
Reach Ranking. Reach rankings take the form of "Rank: #XXX (YY%)". The #XXX score is your overall rank compared to all other twitterers that have been analyzed by twinfluence. If your rank is #400, that means there are 399 other twitterers in the system who have higher reach scores than you. The (YY%) score is your grade; if you have a grade of 75%, it means that you have a higher reach than 75% of the other twitterers we have analyzed.
Relative Scores. There are three derived statistics twinfluence calculates - velocity, social capital, and centralization - that don't really make sense without additional context. For each of these, we compare your values to other twitterers with plus or minus 50% as many followers as you have - so this is essentially a comparison against others with about the same number of followers as you. They take the form of ±X.X Description. The number is how far from average you score (in standard deviations); the second part provides a rough description category for how positive or negative you compare. For example, if you had a social capital score of "+2.1 Very High", you would know that you scored much higher than other people like you for social capital.
Get Twinfluence Now
Other Free Twitter Tools
Social Networking API's
