Monday, August 03, 2009

Twimpact!


For the last one and a half months, Matthias Jugel and I have been working on a site which computes impact scores for twitter users based on how often their tweets become retweeted.

The project was really lots of fun so far. The first time we got the thing up and running was around the time of the Iranian elections and suddenly seeing all those tweets in real-time gave a feeling of directly tapping into the twitterverse.

The winner twimpact wise is clearly mashable with a twimpact score of 89 right now and over ten thousand retweeted messages. Other top users include: news cites like breakingnews, cnnbrk, and smashingmag, or celebrities with many, many followers like aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), or iamdiddy (Puff Diddy).

On the entry page you can see a live view of what has been retweeted most in the last hour. It's quite interesting to see what is popping up there. For example, surprisingly, there are many competitions of the form "retweet this and win a laptop" like this one which has been retweeted over 1300 times. Another kind of retweet is the inspirational message from users like deepak_chopra which people like to pass on. But apart from that you have of course current news, interesting links and so on. These are mostly technology and web related, which reflects the user base of twitter quite well, I think.

So go ahead and compute your twimpact score, or just sit back and look at what people are currently retweeting.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I assume you built twimpact with jBlas backing? :)

Cheerio, Johannes

Mikio Braun said...

So far, we've mostly done "the usual" data base stuff. But, yes, everything's in place for jblas ;)

-M

Anonymous said...

GREAT!

As we get to do more ML stuff again, I downloaded jBLAS and give it a try again in my 64bit box.

Exicted,

johannes

PS: I also dropped a link on my (not yet completely revived blog) here.