Ranking your ego on Twitter

Over the last day or so, a hoohah has broken out on Twitter about Twitterank, a system that ranks your influence. The hoohah was initially the ego-fuel of seeing your name, rank and serial number in lights, and then worries about why is that it wanted your password. The author of the system explains why today on ZDNet:

Similar to how Google’s PageRank algorithm judged a web page based on the number of inbound links and the origin of those links, Twitterank attempts to quantify a Twitter user by analyzing their incoming @replies. In essence, the more people talk to you, the higher your score. So yes, the number you’ll get may not necessarily reflect the number of followers you have, how often you tweet, or even how big your ego is.

That also brings us to passwords. In order to analyze your @replies, I need to make a web service request to Twitter, which requires your user name and password.

Unlike other ranking systems that look at your broadcast noise, Twitterank looks at who is bothering to link to you.

But the really fascinating part is as a measure of the rate of virality of ego-memes, that supposedly savvy geeks would trade their passwords and accept a phishing risk for some strokes:

All in all, from inception to launch, Twitterank took me about 5 hours to build. I finished around 4:30am, posted my Twitterank to Twitter, and went to bed. The next morning, I sent a single tweet to my friends asking them to check out Twitterank, and the beast was unleashed. One hour I had 8 new users. The next hour I had 109. The next 400. Then 1500. Then 2400. All this happened while I was at work, and my primary concern was keeping the site up (my hosting service got overwhelmed, so I eventually switched to a friend’s dedicated server). Unfortunately, it wasn’t until much later that I fully grasped the extent of the rumors, and was able to begin addressing some of the concerns people had.

Ryo Chijiiwa, we salute you

(For the record, I didn't use it - being of even moderate tech skill, it was clear that any system wanting passwords was going to scrape semi hidden data - this use was benign, but one can imagine a lot of other uses of that data that would not be. As to those who did use it, well you have just proven that you are on the PT Barnum end of the Social Media spectrum )