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Twitter Grader Follows @’s

Just 2 days ago, I posted about the update to the Twitter Grader algorithm.

In the post I covered how the algo update now counts follower to following ratios in their scoring and some other cool stuff. I also made a recommendation for the next update: “My recommendation for the next algo update? Figure out a way to incorporate user interaction (@’s, retweets, replys) After all, it’s all about the conversation ;)”

Later that night, I received yet another comment from Dharmesh Shah, the developer behind the Twitter Grader algo. He said:

Thanks for the second round of thoughtful analysis.

The algorithm was indeed updated this weekend (and I think it’s “better”).
Quick note: We have 200,000+ unique profiles that have been graded. In a way, this is good, but the flip side is that it takes some time to “normalize” the database of grades. We’ve got significant server resources powering the software, but I tend to “trickle-in” the recalculations. That’s a long-winded way of saying: It’s going to take some time for the actual grades to completely reflect the updated algorithm.

Making progress (I think). The point about tracking retweets and the “quality” of conversations for a given user profile is a really good one. I’ve been thinking about that one and will try to incorporate something like this in a future update.

Cheers,
Dharmesh

Well, it looks like the future update came sooner than expected! 2 days is a pretty good turn-around time if you ask me! Today, lots of users are noticing a boost in their Twitter grade because of what I believe to be an incorporation into the algo of user-interaction.

Here are a few things to look at:

Just for good measure, here are the charts, even though they are of less significance this round..

Updated Chart:

And the Previous Chart:

Now, take a look at martinbowling, katemorris, and neoblog. All of these users saw somewhat significant jumps in their grades, without significant increases in followers or other activity in updates or following numbers over the past 2 days.

BUT, take a look at these screenshots: (click for popup) martinbowling katemorris neoblog

All of these users have a high volume of incoming @’s, part of the user-interaction recommendation that Dharmesh said would be incorporated!

But there’s more.. I also checked @garyvee’s score, who I have been monitoring over the past few months. He has 18,352 followers, follows 2,134, and 3,306 updates. The past couple months his score has varied from 99.9 to 100.1. But is notorious for not replying to incoming @’s that he receives. Today, after the update, his score is down to a 99.7. Consistent with this trend is @chriswinfield, who also saw a slight drop in score today. Chris and I actually know each other apart from twitter, and he’s a great guy.. But, he gets a TON of @’s because of all of the twitter polls and questions that he does, but doesn’t @ back at nearly the volume that he gets them in. (sorry chris ;))

This leads me to believe that Twitter Grader has incorporated in an update to their algorithm that accounts for incoming and outgoing @’s on your twitter account, like I had mentioned in my last post.

If you find this to be true, leave a comment so I can check out your profile! And remember tweeps, its all about the conversation!

Twitter Grader Part 2

Over the weekend, everyone who is an avid follower of Twitter Grader, noticed a significant change in the algorithm. In my original post I talked about what I noticed to influence the algorithm for twitter grader most heavily. I was quite surprised to see a comment from Dharmesh Shah, the developer for twitter.grader.com, who apparently read my post and said “it’ll be interesting to reconduct the analysis once we go into beta”.

Well, I don’t know if they’re quite in beta yet, but I know that my grade was at a 90 over the weekend, and now its at an 84! So there’s got to be a reason! Here’s what I think…

You will all remember my friend grouping from the last post? Here they are with updated numbers:

These numbers are all as of this morning 11-3, between 11:15 & 11:30 PST.

And just for reference, here is the original list from the last post:

So to start, we can see that there has been quite a bit of variation on the user accounts and on the scoring for almost all users. At the top end, we now have multiple users in the 99th percentile, with several other close to follow. And at the bottom end, scores went from being in the high 50’s - low 60’s to now being high seventies to low to mid 80’s. This is obviously just a result of the user group being an extremely active sampling from twitter. Scores are bound to go up.

But, there are a few things to note that I think are interesting. For example, take a look at davesnyder, his following count went down, follower count went up, and he saw a significant grade change after the algorithm update. -> Clue #1

Clue #2: AussieWebmaster, interestingly enough, saw NO ACTIVITY on his account except for an increase in followers (can you tell me how you did that?), and sees a grade change of almost a full 2 points!

What does this sound like? It sounds like @onstartups read my post and implemented some changes! LOL! Which is good, I think that follower to following ratios should count toward their ranking system, which it clearly didn’t before.

BUT, thats not to say that what I had discovered previously with the update ratios isn’t still part of the algo..

If you take a look at martinbowling, with the most updates @ 10,862, he is up on followers & following less people, but only saw a grade jump of .9. Martinbowling was also a sufferer from the algo update, he was previously in the 99 point range until the update. (Sorry Buddy!) Compare him to oilman, who saw a similar rise in updates and followers, but is following more people, whereas martinbowling is following less, and oilman saw more than a 1 point gain in ranking. (FYI - before the algo update, oilman and martinbowling were .1 apart in score)

The only evidence I can take away from this, is that the update ratio still plays, although less significant than before. And now we also see the incorporation of a following to follower ratio.

I see this as good progress for twitter grader. My recommendation for the next algo update? Figure out a way to incorporate user interaction (@’s, retweets, replys) After all, it’s all about the conversation

People mentioned in this post:

The 70+ Parts of the Twitter Grader Algorithm

By now, most of the hyper-active twitter users are aware of the twitter profile ranking tool twitter.grader.com. Some of us even check it daily. (Just messin with you)

It “grades” your twitter profile on a scale of 100 based on:

At least that’s what they tell you Of course, I wanted to know how it really worked. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Here is a graph of me and some of my reciprocal followers sorted by number of updates:

These numbers are as of this morning, 10-20 between 9:00 - 9:15 AM PST. As you can see, the first 7 on the list are all extremely active users, with significant followings. Their scores vary from 94 - 98.9. I decided not to include anyone with a 100 score in my study, because those users tend to have such large follower numbers, that the results I feel, would be skewed. The last 3 on the list are users, including myself, with scores in the middle range, varying from 57 - 63. Follower counts for these users are all under 100.

Now, there is obviously a correlation between number of followers and twitter score. I would liken this to number of quality inbound links to a website, and page rank. But there are some things to take note of.

I first thought that it would correlate that the ratio of followers to people you follow should significantly affect your score. But, as you can see with NeOBlog, this is not the case. He is following more than 2 times the amount of people that are following him, yet his score remains at the top with a 97.5, and continues to climb. Whereas chriswinfield, on the other hand, has over 6 times as many followers than he is following, and only maintains a mere 1.4 score lead. We see a similar case with the epic duel of martinbowling vs. oilman. Martinbowling only maintains a 1.6/1 ratio of followers/following whilst oilman has a stunning 4/1 ratio yet only leads by a .6 points on twitter grader. So I had to abandon this logic.

I next decided to look into quality of the network of followers. For this I more closely examined the last 3 on the list, because the first 7 have many overlaps in networks. Robertpalmer, kennyhyder, and austincurtis all have similar follower numbers with few overlaps. This was an interesting study, and one that is hard to not be biased on! I’m an SEO and followed by mainly the SEO and internet marketing community. Austincurtis is a professional photographer and designer, and mainly followed by other professional photographers. And robertpalmer is an author at www.tuaw.com and a graphic designer, and mostly followed by other bloggers and designers. Because both Austin and Robert were personal friends of mine before I knew them professionally, and I can’t just say “my following is better” I decided to look at the numbers. Without going too deep, I decided to look at the number of followers for each user, who have a follower count above 1000. The score? robertpalmer: 14, austincurtis: 5, kennyhyder: 14. With the robertpalmer and my count tied, and austincurtis at a significantly lower count, yet all 3 users still so close, I decided to play around a bit. So I went and blocked all of the spammy users who were following me at the moment. (no picture, following 1000 but only 5 followers, etc..) The result? MY SCORE DROPPED! I laughed, obviously twitter grader doesn’t consider the quality of the accounts following you.

After this, I decided to follow @grader, based on the “…a few other things” line, and the fact that every time I checked my score, at the bottom it said “kennyhyder is not following @grader yet”. I thought this may do 2 things. 1. Possibly boost my score a point & 2. I thought it would help with the frequency of crawl rate on my profile.. It did neither.

I was starting to think that the algorithm was simply nothing except how many followers you have. The last thing I had to try was the “pace of your updates”. So I started tweeting like mad. I started tweeting @ people, tweeting when I posted on my blog, tweeting when I was playing poker, tweeting everything.. And soon, the big lead that I once had on austincurtis turned into a small lead. And soon, into his lead. I dominated him on tweets, and even lead on followers, and was following less people, but his score popped up. And then I saw something new, “What about your follower to update ratio?”

So to test this, (and get back my lead on austincurtis) I started following new friends. My following count surpassed my follower count, yes, but we already determined that this doesn’t matter. I followed more and more tweeps, and picked up followers along the way. I did this on fridays because I don’t tend to spend much time on twitter over the weekends, so my follower count would grow, and my update count would stay the same. This worked. In further testing, I would tweet a lot without adding friends, and my score would dip. Aha! This is the supplement to main piece of the algorithm. This is the “content is king” piece!

So obviously, the more followers you have, the better your score will be, but it is nice to see (at least for an seo) that this isn’t the only thing taken into consideration!

People mentioned in this post:

PS: If you liked this post, FOLLOW ME , and then check out this one by David Brown.

Reciprocal Twitter Exchange?

C’mon, you knew it was gonna happen sooner or later!

Yes, that’s right folks a reciprocal twitter follow exchange.

It actually made me laugh at how blatant it was. The best part is, there’s no Matt Cutt’s of Twitter to shake a finger at it yet!

I have come across a few tweeps that have tried to get follows by saying that they will follow back (I didn’t oblige), which is one thing.. That’s ALMOST organic and social… But this is a different thing altogether, maybe @ev can shut off the twitter-juice on people that participate in such programs like he turned off the link juice on profile links when @mattcutts whined.

Silly Tweeps!

If you know of more recip twitter follow exchanges, post a link in the comments so we can rid our twitter-verse of such scandalous activity!

del.icio.us changes to delicious.com?

I just now noticed that del.icio.us redirects to delicious.com…

I personally always liked the .us url, I thought it was clever and unique. But, I can definitely see how it may confuse some users, and I know that I always had to spell it out for friends that weren’t familiar with the site. Yet, delicious.com used to redirect to del.icio.us, so the usability issue for type in traffic shouldn’t have been a big problem. Which would leave me at a branding debate, and I think this one is simply a matter of opinion. .com’s are obviously much more recognizable buy a much broader audience, but on the same note, delicious’s userbase tends to be pretty web savvy.

Sooo… wtf mate? Why did delicious make the switch to .com?

Thoughts?

—

UPDATE: Apparently delicious made this change back in July with the 2.0 version, I just didn’t notice till now because my browser is still cached with del.icio.us! My question still stands though: wtf?

Digg Has been Drinking

I was checking out what was on digg last night, when I came across a little glitch that I’d never seen before. Now digg is slurring its words!-Kenny

Joost! New Social Media Site

I don’t know how far the word has spread yet, but I’m really excited about joost, a new way to watch television… ONLINE! The only problem is, like gmail once was, subscription is by invite only. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten an invite yet. And unlike gmail, I wasn’t able to sign up before the invite-only-period. But either way, I’m still excited!

Social Organism

So, this past week I have been trying to help my cousin make the move from San Diego (where I’m from) to Santa Barbara (where I live). I haven’t been on the job hunt for some time now, but I was reminded of the agony/intrigue of it this week as my cousin is on the hunt. The interesting thing to me is that, no matter where you are, or what your skill set is, there always seems to be a conversation with someone you know that starts off: “I know this guy…” Now, sometimes it’s just the necessary smoke that gets blown, but occasionally its that spark that ignites a beautiful opportunity. It was this thought that led me to consider the possibility, that no matter where you are, or what your circumstance is, we are all part of an organic, social culture. Whether it’s someone you know that hooks you up with a job, or 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon, we are all networked by nature. It is this aspect of our being that make certain aspects of being a web developer incredibly interesting. These past few weeks, Justin and I have had pretty extensive conversation regarding the whole aspect of ’social media’. A site like Digg incorporates most all of the aspects of just being in relationship with people. Some things that come up are valuable and interesting. Some things are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but get a lot of attention. And some things are people trying to exist in a place that they have no business being. The problem is, the latter two seem to be much more common than the former. As I expressed previously, it is this reason that has turned me off to the social media world. But I am beginning to see the value of sifting through all of the bs to get to the meat that is worth chewing.

I think we are all at a point where we are warmed up to the idea and concept behind social media, so let’s move forward now! I think it’s time to stop theorizing about it and start practicing. “Practice and preach, don’t Theorize and Teach” -Anonymous. We know what we like, and what we don’t. We all have ideas that would improve the current realm of social media, sooo… GO! If it’s truly social media that we’re talking about, there should be nothing preventing us from changing the way that this beast grows and flourishes. WE are the body, we belong to it, and we make up the very cells that cause it to exist. It is time to take ownership and make something wonderful. -kenny

Social Media Hype

So, for some time now I have had this sort of (and I know it’s cliché) love-hate relationship with aspects of the whole ’social media’ world. On one hand, I absolutely love what sites like del.icio.us have done for me. A way to track what I like in an orderly, accessible manner, that is user friendly and sensible. On the other hand, I roll my eyes when I hear someone say “Did you see that site up on Digg?”. Up until now, my opinion of Digg has been that it is simply a Myspace for web geeks. It’s not that I haven’t used Digg, or Myspace for that matter, but when I do use them I keep it to myself. The same way I use del.icio.us to track sites for ME, not for everyone else to see. So now we come to this week. On Monday, my buddy and partner Justin Walton, wrote an article that received quite a lot of attention on Digg. Being as we talk via im constantly throughout the day, he informed me when it had received a few hundred diggs. We continued to watch the numbers climb through the morning until it hit about 1400 diggs, when our server crashed. After scrambling a bit to get it back up and running, we watched the article climb to be the #4 most popular article of the day across the board. It is currently at 2871 diggs! Since monday, we have been seeing the results of this article’s popularity. We had something like 54,000 unique hits on our server, 550 people subscribed via RSS to Justin’s blog, he gained over a hundred new links to his site, and will be appearing soon on Jason Calacanis’s podcast. Now, Justin and I are both benefitting greatly from this. As we are starting a business together, all of the hype and new traffic to our sites will pay out long term no doubt. And as search marketers, Justin and I are also very happy to have the increase in link traffic and publicity. So, as it turns out, my opinion of sites like Digg, is not so bad anymore. I can see the benefit that is offered to web developers and bloggers alike. Whether you are tying to make a point, or sell a product, this whole environment of social media turns out to benefit us all! -kenny