Friday, June 19, 2009

TwitterRep Bookmarklet

In support of the Iranian people, I've decided to help distinguish between the trustable users on Twitter and the non-trustable users. I built a bookmarklet to aide in this process.

FindTheRats, this one's for you.

TwitterRep <-- drag to bookmark bar

This code looks at a user's follower count, following count, and update count and alerts back a number. No saying how reliable it is (won't work for users with more than a million of any of those values, BTW), but it seems to do a good enough job of picking apart the wheat from the chaff.

Example time!

Good users:
mousavi1388 -- 712174233
iran09 -- 681975
TehranBereau -- 371922
persiankiwi -- 82745541
StopAhmadi -- 8964349
Change_for_Iran -- 149722592

Bad users:
simonjake -- 19
tahria -- 27
giti456789 -- 1
Toby1776 -- 18
iranianlecturer -- 174
serv_ -- 3898
Karmuk -- 89

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As you can see, the users you should follow have TwitterReps several orders of magnitude larger than those you shouldn't follow.

And by the way, I've got a TwitterRep of 46. Stop laughing.

Note: Just because you have a low TwitterRep does NOT automatically mean that you are un-trustworthy, as my account is an example. Just follow th converse: you CAN trust the sources with TwitterReps over, say, 50000.

Oh, and for the curious: aplusk has the highest TwitterRep (calculated manually) of 105,292,837,174.
Sorry, this is wrong. Both TheEllenShow and CNNBRK have higher TwitterReps, CNNBRK winning with a TwitterRep of 638,462,456,808, over 6 TIMES aplusk.

Also for the curious: the calculation scheme I use is:

b = # of following
a = # of followers
u = # of updates

TwitterRep = log10(10+u)*a*(a+1)/(b+1);

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