Twittularity
by Imran Ali
A few weeks ago, I introduced my extended family to Twitter and they’re *hooked*. Unfortunately, I’m now regularly caught in the crossfire of familial ribbing; worst of all, a second cousin has accused my tweets of being more boring her husband’s!
Of course, I attempted to demonstrate empirically that I was indeed more interesting. Could ‘interestingness’ be a function of Twitter’s friends and followers? How about subtracting the former from the latter - a large number of less intimate relationships could indicate that more ’strangers’ are interested in your tweets and you’re therefore more interesting?
Employing this watertight (yes, watertight!) algorithm, here’s how we fared in a random leaderboard of interestingess…
- Darth Vader: 1708
- Barack Obama: 514
- Me: 18
- Alan Johnson: 4
- My rival: -1
- John Edwards: -95
So Darth Vader is more interesting than a pair of US presidential contenders and a British candidate for Deputy PM. More importantly, I’m more interesting than Irfan - his negative score only adds to my gloatiness! Though, I’m sure both of us appear equally uninteresting to our family…
