Fresh Twitter data on Infochimps, plus Announcing Trst.me | Hacker News Reader

Fresh Twitter data on Infochimps, plus Announcing Trst.me

blog.infochimps.org

22 pointscwilson7 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

I can verify that Infochimps has had this in the pipeline for well over a year. I met with Flip Kromer a long while ago and he was excited about it then.

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

http://trst.me/

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

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