Twitalyzer is completely borked
I just tried out Twitalyzer, a funky little tool that lets you get some fun statistics about Twitter users. The statistics are broken down into a number of categories. The category of influence is made up based on a combination of all the other categories.
The first category is signal-to-noise ratio. That would seem important. Someone posting interesting updates and cool links is obviously more valuable and worth following than someone who just promotes their shitty social media coaching and SEO consultancy. But wait, how do you determine signal? Well, Tweetalyzer bases it on the references you make to other people, links, hashtags and retweets. See, I’m not sure any of those form a useful measure of someone’s signal-to-noise ratio, let alone in conjunction. The people who spend all day retweeting idiotic links filled with hashtags are precisely the people I’m uninterested in, because that stuff is just a side order. You could probably write a robot that’d do nothing but join in the self-referential game of link-whore-ish retweeting. In fact, that stuff seems to be more noise than signal. What would be a far more useful signal-to-noise ratio would be to actually follow the links - dereferencing the shorteners - and see the variety of links. If they all go to ShittySeoBlog.blogspot.com, then that person has quite a lot of noise. If they go all over the place, that’s probably not spammy. Of course, you’d have to do some clever stuff to deal with the various social networks - someone could be a great Twitterer even though they spend all their time linking to the same site - but they might be linking to fifty different videos on YouTube, or photos on Flickr (etc.).
On the same token, referentiality is no guarantee of anything. What’s more useful: “Trains broken down, will be late to meeting” or “@lolzster that was a pretty funny lolcat. lol!”. If I was actually late for a meeting and my friends were reading my tweets, the former would be a lot more useful than the latter. In fact, I can’t think of any instance where the latter message would be very interesting, and the inclusion of an ‘@’ reference makes it neither more nor less useful to anyone but the recipient.
The next category is “Generosity”. Generosity means nothing more than how much you retweet. Which is an atrocious definition. I don’t retweet at all. There is a lot of generosity on Twitter - people giving useful information in response to queries. That has very little to do with retweeting. Retweeting is the ultimate form of laziness. I mean, seriously, you’ve only got to fill 140 characters, and you are too lazy even for that?! I subscribe to your tweets to read what you have to say, not to see how often you can press the Retweet button in TweetDeck or whatever.
“Velocity” is the next category, which is actually a misnomer - “frequency” is the word being grasped for. I quote: But the reality of the situation is that the most influential people in Twitter are, by and large, writing a lot which helps increase the awareness of their personal brand, the likelihood that they will be referenced, and the likelihood that they will be retweeted by others.
To which I want to shout - so what? Quantity and quality are very rarely ever related. Are we seriously saying that someone posting five tweets a day that are interesting, informative and real are less important in Twitter than the chronic retweeting social whore who sits there just bashing retweet all day until they hit 1,500 a week. That’s a completely bollocksed-up measure. Yes, posting lots increases awareness of one’s personal brand
. Getting your willy out and parading around Trafalgar Square may also boost your personal brand - but that’s doesn’t really take into account the fact that you end up looking like a complete idiot doing so.
“Clout” is how often you are referenced. That seems a reasonable enough measure of your Twitter clout.
It seems slightly silly to criticize an inherently silly service, but I do think it’s important: it codifies values about how we use the web. It prioritizes something which I think is inherently unimportant - personal brand - over the worth of one’s contributions. The people whose “personal brands” I respect the most are the people who don’t care about personal brand at all. They just hang out online and use Twitter for what it’s supposed to be: a fun service where you tell others what you are up to. All the marketing stuff, and the inherent push to turn it into a hit parade of self-referential crapness, is a huge turn off and is one of the main reasons I’m distressed by the number of celebrities and “normal” people (as opposed to the three-eyed green lizards with bad breath who currently occupy it, one presumes) who have turned up and are in the process of doing to Twitter what the Eternal September did for USENET.
