Loic Le Meur is asking Twitter to add an authority filter to their search (he also goes on a rant about Sprint, but ignore that). He wants to sort through Twitter messages based on how many followers the person writing has, so he’ll know the relative importance of what’s being said.
The way he argues isn’t pretty (“We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web”) but what he says has merit. The number of followers a Twitter user has is effectively a volume button – the more followers, the higher the volume of what’s being said. This is exactly what Technorati does with blog search (and where I grabbed the green bit in the image to show what it might look like).
He uses the Le Web conference as an example. 7,000 or so tweets were written that mentioned the event, and he doesn’t want to sort through all of them. Give him a filter to look at just the ones by users with at least 1,000 followers, he says, and he’ll be happy.
I’m with him on this. Most of the time I just want to read everything people are writing about a topic to more or less take the temperature of the masses on whatever I’m researching. But sometimes it would be nice to hear what just the top users are saying on a particular topic, too, since so many more people hear their message.
Given that Twitter, God love em, are more focused on stability these days than new feature releases, I wouldn’t expect this any time soon. But perhaps an industrious third party can take a crack at it. Don’t forget that Twitter search is actually a product created by a startup called Summize. Twitter bought them in July.
Surely TweetBeep or some other 3rd party offers this. It would also be great if Twitter offered default categories for viewing tweets (i.e. Technology, Politics, etc.). I really like the election.twitter.com page during the debate. Twitter or some 3rd party app should build on this to offer Twitter Channels (twitter for websites and other media) and Twitter Groups if they don’t already exist.
just when you thought the wisdom of crowds was going to improve our quality of life.
search engines should have authority based search.
in the near future all of the internet will be filtered. users and businesses will have rankings like a fico score.
whomever creates the best internet filtration system just might be on to something.
RatingLocator.com – get screened
I am getting very tired of “ratinglocator.com” posting a first response or close to it on every TechCrunch post.
Usually it’s a fairly vapid, meaningless comment, and it’s obviously only designed to get someone to come to your website.
This is close to, if not actual, spam.
Seriously. All this clown does is click ‘reply’ to the first response on every post and types in a dumb ’seemingly’ related reply so he can link to his moronic idea of a startup.
Moronlocator.com – pls add this to your list and put your profile on it.
This has been going for at least six months. Despite tons of complaints from loyal readers, TC and Arrington continue to do nothing about it.
/disappointed
Can someone please add this spammer’s IP to a ban list? It’s getting quite annoying.
Alltop meets Twitter! Great idea! I think Guy Kawasaki could put that together!
While I don’t automatically discount your point (I definitely see the logic there), I have to say that even for high trending topics with thousands of tweets, many people don’t care to hear conversations based on the volume of the people talking.
Take #cyborgcamp in Portland, Oregon, which happened recently and was the number one term for the day and was streamed online. In that case, there were people with very few followers making salient points that got heard because others saw them through search.twitter.com
In other words, for many, many people, the point of Twitter search is to find things said about a topic of interest regardless of how influential the person speaking is.
For those like you and Loic, who are influential and use strong filters on social networks, this is a really good thing. For all us regular folks who make up the majority and want to search topically, how about Twitter leaves the decisions about relevance up to us, mkay?
# of followers is a useless metric. Everyone is gaming that. What I’d rather see is tweets presented in order of most retweets to least. THAT is a metric that is hard to game and very useful.
After that, friendfeed is gathering additional metadata, but friendfeeds’ search really sucks so far. Imagine if you could search all tweets based on numbers of “likes” or numbers of comments.
Hmm, I agree that number of followers is a useless metric. Since Twitter is resistant to implement features that users incessantly use (hashtags, retweets, etc.), I think the retweet quota would be a hard one to track.
Favorites, though, are a good measure (the number of people who have starred your individual tweets) or even the number of @ replies others have sent to you.
Ultimately, it’s all about rewarding those who others find valuable—just like Google does with Page Rank.
I completely agree with this point as well. It seems so easy to just go out and follow 2500 people, and chances are, you’ll end up with at least 1500 new followers immediately.
It’s a little disingenuous when the owner of “video Twitter”, Seesmic, is saying that we’re not all equal and that searches should illustrate this fact. So, are we to build software pandering to a handful of people, ignoring the majority of the community.
This just sounds horribly divisive.
The # of RTs (or how many times a tweet has been faved/liked) maybe more difficult to game than the # of followers. But it still depends heavily on the number of followers someone has. And like that you’ll never catch the high quality new entrants, as building up a large follower crowd takes a lot of time, considering that new followers per time depend on how many followers you already have.
So, if you want to go for quality, a somewhat better measure would be dividing the number of times a tweet has been faved or retweeted by the number of followers someone has. I.e. inverted:
position of a particular tweet in results ~= #followers/(#faved + #RTs)
Computationally more expensive, but at Google they would do that with a snap of a their fingers.
Of course one needs to block/ban all spammers from showing up in the results, but that needs to be done anyway.
Mike: I don’t think that adding an additional search filter would necessarily impact the stability of Twitter. Do they need all of their heads just to keep that thing up and running? If so, I’m really worried.
oh my dear ego! Scratch that shit.
I just went over to http://www.retweetradar.com/.
Then I clicked on the biggest tag which is @JesseNewhart, so was forwarded to
http://search.t...q=@JesseNewhart
Now take a look at this list. JesseNewhart just seems to be a living spam bomb. Every second of his tweets has a pattern similar to these
* Top 10 reasons why … (fill in random shit)
* The absolute worst way to use … (again)
* 100 tons of … dropped on … (with video)
* The reason why you have to read this tweet and why you will retweet it (this one’s made up)
No wonder he’s retweeted and replied that much. Does that mean it’s quality stuff he’s tweeting? Maybe, compared to the usual “Good morning twitterland! Making coffee.” tweets.
More likely, Jesse just proves what we all know: “The more trivial, the more popular”! Take a look at all the popular TV entertainment shows (there it’s about millions of viewers, not thousands of followers – it’s true mass). They’re dumb and dumber. That’s exactly what’s popular. It’s a mix of low intellectual requirements and psychology (read: mankind’s curiosity).
But is this any indication for quality? No.
So scratch my formula above. Quantity never reflects quality. It’s two different things. And Jesse is the proof.
Let Twitter be twitter and forget about distinguishing between nightingales and crows.
the twitter api makes it easy to do what is asked for here, but it also makes EVERYTHING easy to game. fact. (especially the retweeting idea)
I also get a slight feeling that this idea is a little ‘elitist’ in a way. I dunno – a gut feeling i get from these ideas. not good. Just because someone doesn’t follow a lot of people or isn’t followed by many people and suddenly their opinion is overlooked or of less value to those who might gain something from receiving it.
All these popularity contest-like sites and lists full of people echoing eachother all the time just seems to take some of the original spirit away from Twitter. imho.
There are also plenty of people who think that re-Tweets are stupid and should be avoided.
Why should someone with 100 followers retweet something that was said by someone with 30,000 followers?
If I wanted to know what Person X said, I’d follow Person X. If I’m not following any of the people with 30k followers, it’s because I don’t give a rat’s ass what they are saying.
A sycophantic echo chamber is as stupid of a metric as # of followers.
If you want a “power of the people” metric, “Trending Topics” on search.twitter.com is a good one.
If you want a “How can the Popular Kids in the Blogosphere Get to Think They Are More Important on Twitter?” then use # of followers or reTweets.
Or just STFU and enjoy Twitter without needing some virtual dick-measuring device to reassure you that you’re an important “brand”.
Loic’s idea is more of the web, as it is now. Twitter changes the dynamics. I’ll never have as many followers as JCal or LArmstrong but that doesn’t make my content less relevent as i usually write about the economy http://tinyurl.com/9y6t7c
and not about technology.
I am not sure that we need search by authority as much as we need a Twitter Authority Directory.
# of followers if the only metric that most Twitter directories use, which makes it hard to find people that actually have something to say.
Some with 1,000 followers that only follows 50 people, interacts with lots of people, and loads of people RT what they tweet will currently rank in Twitter directories below someone with 2,000 followers that followed 3,000 people just to get to 2,000 followers that doesn’t tweet anything interesting or participate in the community.
Does that make a Twitter directory based on # of followers useful?
I would say not.
Would someone please build a quality-based Twitter Directory (even just multiplying # of followers by a quality score would be a huge improvement (# of followers / # following).
I think Twitter should do it. It is an additional feature which people may also like.
OMG. Do you guys even remember how the blogosphere turned the traditional media upside down? Bloggers with “no authority” other than dozens of readers made it all happen.
Following people with more followers is like going to CNN or FT for News because they have more “authority” instead of the Blogsosphere or Twitter for that matter.
A better solution would be to allow add people to his search results and Twitter could find results from those (call it featured results) than display the rest at the bottom.
Common Loic, this would be like taking 10 steps backwards.
rokhayakebe: sorry, you’re wrong. Bloggers always had authority searches thanks to Google (which is TOTALLY based on popularity, just like what Loic wants). Google became a multi-billion-dollar business, so I bet we’ll see authority searches again. I just don’t think # of followers is a useful metric/meta data to study because it is so easily gamed. Something like # of retweets is far more useful.
I think in this article “authority” means “more followers”. So the point I am trying to make is that just because someone has more followers does not necessarily make their tweets any more valuable than others.
And the “authority” that bloggers had was mostly to their content.
Gogl is totally based on adsenze.
popularity does not equal authority.
example: i am the authority when it comes to the development of next generation search engines and still not very popular here.
Google is an amazing technology but platforms are built with blood and sweat, brands are built with tears.
retweets is about as meaningful as number of followers – they are inextricably linked. high number of followers likely to mean high number of retweets. it would be far more effective to look at this concept ‘like ripples in a pond’ – you need to see how far the ripples extend from the originator – this is much more than just a retweet count. dt
Although I’ve responded at my blog, I am compelled to chime in here. My flat response is that such a call by Loic would not happen if he had less than 800 followers himself.
Twitter doesnt even have an active search at all at the moment, this is moot.
This could have disastrous conseqeunces:
Imagine Loic Le Meur being recognised as an expert in organising international conferences…
Imagine Loren Feldman being recognised as a leading light in the post web2.0 world and as the only person who can take on mainstream media with his “innovative” puppets…
Imagine Robert Scoble being recognised as an authority on business management theory…
Imagine Jason Calacanis and Mahalo being recognised as the future of online search…
Twitter would become the word of the year: meh…
James, this already happens. I’m #1 on Google for “recession 2008:” http://www.goog...mp;aq=f&oq=
How did that happen?
Wow, I did not realise you were an authority in this area too!
Kind of shows up shortcomings of this approach though and clients such as tweetdeck already allow searches through people you follow (personal authority) so don’t really see any added value – other than ad revenue for this link bait post of course!
then, the disaster is already happening…
Leave it to the french to define another way to be elitist.
Seriously just when I think we are trending towards smart and relevant and contextually useful conversations, some muppet mistake numbers for value and gets everyone believing in it.
These numbers can of course be gamed. Especially since regular tweeters are goingt obe visited and followed by a large number of spammers and short lived accounts.
Im more interested in links and conversations that are re tweeted and reposted. Thats real buzz when something is talked about lots of times.
Still I guess if you out in the lead and looking for more ways to validate your opinions then I guess big numbers in your follower counts gives you another measuring stick to define your comfort blanket of worth !
Popularity does not equate to accuracy. If it did and Twitter existed 2000 years ago; the earth would still be flat.
You’re trying to qualify topic-authority on a parameter that can easily have a false-positive. Before topic-authority can be established, identity has to established first.
I’m in favor or some filtering over none. Worried about giving the wrong people authority? Then fine, call it what it is: popularity. It is still a useful metric compared to oh say…the firehose equivalent search results I’m getting on Twitter.
Seems like too much worrying is going on here. Surely at some point they’ll add a minimum amount of followers as an optional filter on their advanced search, which is already fairly robust.
“We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web”
Wow, what a stunningly egotistical statement.
If you really want to sort in a Google PageRank fashion, don’t base it on a metric as stupid and irrelevant as follower count, but instead on the number of tweets linking to individual tweets (e.g. Replies). If people reply to or retweet a specific twitter message, it might have some significance.
Hello,
I totally agree to what Josh Jonte said:
“Popularity does not equate to accuracy.”
Some people with no followers can say interested things and some people with a lot of followers say silly things!
I agree with most of the people in this discussion. Good ideas propagate, bad ideas disappear. There are lots of tools out there to amplify the signal now including FF’s like and best of day system as well as openzap etc. The only problem is that these third party apps aren’t in wide use on Twitter.
Here are two ideas:
1. Searching by # times favorited/number of followers.
2. Add a “like” option to act as the rating system while the “favorite” is more like a bookmark.
The word “Favorite” itself is a hurdle, I’m more likely to click on “like” if I like something than click on “favorite.”
Isn’t that just what TwitTangle, which I wrote about a couple of days ago, is trying to do something about? Granted, they don’t have search yet, but they do give you a timeline based on how important YOU say your Twitter friends are to you.
http://www.tech...witter-friends/
We just launched a top 10.000 according to followers at TwitterCounter. Maybe we can combine that in some way with Search.Twitter to produce authority based results. Let me think about that for a while…
Google PageRank for Twitter’s pages is the most relevant,though Twitter needs your own specific PageRank.
i very much like the idea of authority-based twitter search. however, the number of followers alone is probably not a good metric. also the number of retweets is not a good metric alone, given the fact that many ppl just don’t retweet even if and when they read an interesting tweet. a combination of # of followers / retweets / @replies (and maybe some more relevance metrics) might be an interesting approach though and lead to developing a useful authority filter. example: “show me the three tweets about [my event] with the biggest impact.”
Just for fun, an algo for Twitter authority http://tr.im/2o0q
What you do is trying to calculate the authority of a person. The advantage of blogging and microblogging however is that authority can also be assigned to individual posts and tweets.
So don’t take the *total* number of RTs in relation to the *total* number of tweets of a person, but rather the number of RTs per tweet in relation to the number of followers. Etc. (needs some refinement in order to prevent those with 1/1 being the top-listed tweets.. so to some extent, the total number of followers should be weighed in, too)
for those who define their lives by what others think … perfect …
What one person calls authority, another person calls filter, and yet another would call squelch.
I like squelch.
Twitter search needs squelch.
It’s funny how you adult geeks are arguing over a useless piece of technology.
All the years in school being snubbed by the hot girls and popular kids, I’m glad to see you guys now have an avenue to become ‘hot and popular’ yourself at least amongst the likes of yourselves.
I can see Loic point and alsoo agree with him. However, don`t you think that sometimes a message from a regular user with only 20 followers can worth much more than others with 100Ks followers. I really look at this from Content and Qualitative points of view rather a Quantitative one.
Surely authority is the wrong word.. It should be audience or simply following. Why is someone with a lot of followers more authoritative then someone with less following, they simply have a greather audience for their thoughts. It is not a power they command.
Enabling search on Twitter is needed, but another important feature Twitter needs to enable is comments.
To allow users to post replies and comments on whatever other users post. Similar to the Facebook status update.
Why limit authority to Twitter metrics…
If you view Twitter as a platform authority should not be solely determined from where the conversation takes place.
Some more thoughts on that http://bit.ly/VcuZ
Given the fact that people use twitter in a myriad of ways, I’m not so sure that we should apply some sort of one-size-fits all filter based on a metric that noet everyone values the same. Quantity is good yes, but how about quality? And what if someone who really has a lot to say that is highly valuable, simply doesn’t have the time to engage in twitter the way power users do and never really get that authority?
The next great Tweet could come from anyone and more then likely they’ll not be fat with Followers.
I agree with scoble. Re tweets is the way to go.
I’m not with either of you on this. The number of Twitter followers is something that can totally be gamed to the point where it is useless. On one of my Twitter accounts, I have 374 Twitter followers. If I wanted to, I could probably get that number up to 1000 in a few days. (I would just need to follow the people who autofollow spam bots who follow me on my primary Twitter account.) And such an algorithm would probably favor a lot of non-human accounts such as the New York Times, the Chicagoist, Weirdnews. You know the type of accounts? Where we follow the Twitter feed instead of subscribing to the ress feed?
And with lots and lots of people trying to push up their numbers to have their numbers? Unless you are ZOMG internet famous where most of your followers have less than 200 followers, you likely don’t have have a high click through ratio for links you provide just because there is so much noise and links have such little sticky time on you Twitter page.
For blogs, it is a useful metric where you have an audience that is longer than 2 seconds it takes to fall off a person’s twitter front page. Twitter? Not so much.
I would be interested to compare those who have the highest number of reciprocal followers with the list of the most populare Twitterers. My intuition is that that would be a good indication of authority and would be hard to game. “I follow you and you follow me” is a vote of relevancy that goes to the credit of both parties within their networks. What do y’all think?
Or it could be a sign of who has an autofollow script on. I love Twitter for meaningful things that people I know or met said. It also helps me keep up with people from other services like LiveJournal who are switching services and I couldn’t keep track of otherwise. I don’t autofollow people who provide what I consider meaningful content or who I have a relationship with.
Your metric would reward people who autofollowed and punish people who want relationships and meaning on Twitter. And reward people who were for gaming the system by encouraging people to focus less on content and relationships and more on trying to get more followers.
I agree Laura, you’re right. I did not consider the auto-follow option.
Reading the other commenters again, I am leaning towards leaving things the way they are and let those who want to develop various authority filters to just do it for themselves. There are many existing tools for slicing and dicing your Twitter feeds any way you like.
pure quantitative metrics need to be augmented with qualitative metrics such as # of rt, # of links, # of favorited or some other future rating mechanism, ratios combining the above with # of followers and even dynamic metrics such as trends of followers gained or lost over time and finally semantic searches capabilities to weed out the not so relevant tweets… then combining both quantitative, qualitative metrics, dynamic and semantic filtering one minimizes the risk of missing that pearl of a tweet from someone not necessarily followed by many. can’t wait for the future of twitter
Organizing Twitter Search by Authority is the wrong attribute. Instead, focus search by your OWN social connections. People you actually know score higher relevancy.
I think it will be best if Twitter allow people to create lists (groups) of friends they want to read updates from -each one from its main stream. Exactly like FriendFeed are doing. It simply works and the user has control of the filter.
Who is Loic Le Meur?
Technorati can’t get authority right (lets just call it complete and utter crap)… Technorati is totally valley centered and twitter will be just the same if the take this route. No one has sorted authority on the web yet. One clue though imo. Authority per category… like tech/ valley/ europe/ india/ celeb… so I can avoid Brittney’s interesting tweets if I want
DC, totally disagree with you here. Looks like you’re just jumping on the ‘Technorati Sucks’ bandwagon….which wasn’t cool even in 1999.
For me, Technorati Authority is useful to weight what a blog (or maybe a twitter post) is stirring up. Reaction, links, etc build this – and I think it makes sense and works fairly well.
What Scoble is saying makes the most sense for twitter though since it’s true that most people are trying to game the follower numbers. Retweets or replies might be useful data points.
Michael, why do you keep publicizing what someone as irrelevant for the world as Loic says/does? Are you friends again, not caring for the real value of his posts/words? pity…
there are so many *real* entrepreneurs out there to follow/retweet… why keep doing it with a fail like him?
in any case, all he’s saying is that people should be able to filter their searches by other criteria. What a genius!!
instead of asking for new features for twitter, Loic should concentrate his genius in developing features for his own site, and stop telling other, more successful companies what to do.
I’m thinking loic is considering (or in the process of adding) this functionality into twhirl. Gaming the filters will be more difficult if the logic is defined on the client side, personalized by the user.
doing this client side is the best way of doing this, with some aggregation of the results across all users. i dont see any other way. #followers means nothing, retweets is linked to #followers – either way let the individual determine the outcome.
Just because someone is a “twitter slut” and will follow anyone doesn’t mean they have any authority. These are Loic’s own twitter stats (15,964 Following) (15,233 Followers). He’s a twitter whore.
Hey, I know.
Let’s ask those guys who already own the most valuable real estate on the net (the biggest egos?) and invite them to help us find what we’re looking for on twitter.
Better than that, let’s let them help us find everything on the Web. Heck Robert Scoble already is an expert on the economy based on his earlier ego-motivated comment. Why don’t you guys get together and develop a universal search application. Run every search through your Web presence first, put those results up, then search the rest of the Web and put those results below.
Should make everyone happy.
Twitter already has a built in filter, it’s called following people that matter.
If a startup wants to filter searches based on whatever metrics are available – # followers, reach, . . . and provide access to such results, I’m sure there will be at least two prominent devotees of the service…. and they’ll use their notoriety to encourage others to use the service.
My bet, it will flop.
As I just replied to Loic on my blog and his, filtering should be driven by the needs and desires of listeners, not by those who stand to gain more attention market share by filtering out competing claims on that attention.
http://thenoisy...int-of-twitter/
uh, you’re kidding right? the number of followers means nothing = no correlation with credibility or reliability of an information source. this is like info assets 101…
want an example: check out adherents.com – now tell me which religion is correct. thanks.
idiotic idea…
“…tell me which religion is correct”
The answer is simple. In computing there is something called a checksum. I’m sure most people understands the importance of a checksum to determine integrity.
There is a religion whose holy book contains a checksum based on the number 19.
Google for it and verify it for yourself.
Sort by number of followers/followed/length of twitter account in months are all interesting variables.
Not sure why someone doesn’t just build this themselves?
I don’t think we need an official authority meter from Twitter itself. If a third party wants to implement it, well that’s fine with me. But Twitter itself should remain the messy democracy that it is. Really, if you don’t know the authority level who you’re following then why are you following him in the first place?
Solution: Do both, let the user opt in to authority based ranking if they want, remain without it if they don’t.
Loic, why not just text people who are your little friends in the Valley on your i-Phone or AIM or something, instead of having to drag Twitter into your schemes to give them more volume than they already have through their follower-whoring?
Loic for president of “the 250″ (maybe with the addition of his hero, Sarkozy, “the democrat”. Create your own twitter-like app and leave us alone.
I believe that this search tool should be used by ranking who tweets the most rather than who is the most popular. Twitter should be crediting their most active users in comparison to people using the service for money.
I think it would be a mistake for Twitter to start censoring unpopular voices.
Where do all the tinyURLs go? http://www.krumlr.com a social bookmarking site with a Twitter twist will easily bookmark your interesting pages and tweet about them too with a single click.
It could be a formula that combines several pertinent metrics: Number of followers, number of retweets, number of tweets, number of @replies. That could be done right?
Then you can put in a key word and narrow it to a particular topic. Yes, that’s how it should be done.
Would someone create that please?
Dumb. Period.
you’re making the assumption that because you have more tweets what you say is valuable?
i agree we are not all created equal – how many readers your blog has or how many tweet followers you have has no direct correlation with quality of the content you produce. is it better than nothing? probably worse actually because it means the lone voice in the corner with something interesting to say will never get heard
but keep shouting in the vacuum tube….seemed to work for most of 08