Thanks to Twitter  (a Tweet by Angela Maiers) I found a post called Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive. I’ve tried all five of them and yes they can be addictive. I wrote a little about some of these five plus Twitter counter in an earlier post called Twitter Stats – Entertainment Value Only. If you’ve read that post you  know I am somewhat skeptical of any of these statistic sites but that hasn’t kept me from looking at them from time to time.

So if you are at all interested check out Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive and get a good basic understanding of what these stats sites offer.

BTW an other site you may find interesting is Reteetist. Retweetist provides statistics on the number of times people’s Tweets are “retweeted” or passed along to new sets of followers. So if you want to get some idea of who or how often things you tweet are retweeted this may be a fun site to play with.

The first thing you have to know is that I am somewhat addicted to statistics. Especially if I am involved at all. So of course statistics for things like my blogs, Facebook, online forums and Twitter take up too much of my personal time. Lately I’ve been looking a lot at Twitter statistics. basically I’m finding them not all that useful. The two big reasons for this is that most of them are opt-in and that the Twitter API limits how much information one can get at a time.

By opt-in I mean that people have to tell the grading services that there is an account that they should  be looking at. TwitterCounter has words on its page that suggest it goes looking for people. Could be but I’m sure they are not finding everyone. So if no one involved with a twitter account tells the service about it then it doesn’t get counted. I suspect that really serious twitter users know about these services and check in on them so it may be that under reporting leans to people who don’t use Twitter that much. Also since one can’t get as much information as one might like on a timely basis there is a long lag time and ratings can easily get out of sync with reality.

But Let’s look at a couple of rating sites.

Twitterholic uses raw follower count to rate Twitter users. The more followers the higher your rating (the lower the rank number). Twitterholic also rates users for locations. This is hard because people are not entering their locations in a consistent format. But they try.

TwitterCounter also just uses follower count for there ranking. If you look at the chart below you will find that my account has a much lower ranking at Twitter Counter than it does at Twitterholic. Clearly Twitter Counter tracks more people. Twitter Counter promises Top 100 lists by location and they seem to usually work for the top 100. Beyond that not so much. There don’t break things down by states but by time zone. A couple of US states are their own time zone though which makes that interesting in a way. On the other hand people are entering time zones in their profiles that have little or no relationship with their actual location. We begin to really understand the problems with location data in Twitter accounts now.

Twinfluence and Twitter.Grader both take the statistics a step or two further. Twinfluence takes into account the number of followers ones followers have. This results in a reach number – the theoretical number of people (ignoring duplicate followers) that a twitter message could reach if every follower sent that message on to their followers. So people whose followers have a lot of followers score higher than those who have a lot of followers who don’t themselves have many followers. Did I lose you yet?

Twitter.Grader uses a similar scheme where the value of your followers is a big part of your own score. This just begs for a recursive mess but it seems to work. Sort of. The thing that stands out here is that my position in the list (raw score) is better in Twinfluence but the percentile I fit into is higher in Twitter.Grader. I’m not sure how to parse that except that Twinfluence probably knows a lot fewer Twitter accounts and the way they rate people is different from Twitter.Grader.

Speaking of other effects of different users being followed. You will notice that Twitterholic rates me as that 13th most followed twitter account but Twitter.Grader ranks me at 24th. This is not because of the way Twitter.Grader ranks people so much as that they know a lot more Twitter accounts than Twitterholic.  All of the people Twitter.Grader shows as higher ranking in the state than me have higher follower counts. Several NH Twitter users who have lower Twitter.Grader scores also have higher follower counts. So the value of the Twitterholic count is marginal in my opinion.

I think these rankings may be of some use for comparison within the tools but not across the tools. Also I think as absolute values they are limited for anything beyond amusement purposes. I’m always looking for other Twitter rating/ranking services BTW so if you know of any drop a comment or Twitter me @alfredtwo.

Now twitter could create good rankings if they wanted to.. They have much easier, faster and more complete access to the data. It could be as simple as rating by followers of course or as complicated as they want. It’s probably an open question as it if there is a good reason for them to do it though. There is plenty of gaming of the system as it is and better ratings might make that worse.

Every so often I start to feel like there is no more room to stuff information in my brain. Today is one of those days. Now I know from experience that given a little time my brain will reorganize things and Ill be able to fit more in. I’m not sure if it tosses stuff away or what. I guess if it tossed information away it would probably do so in a way that I didn’t know it was missing. On the other hand from time to time it occurs to me that I used to know something that I can’t quite seem to remember.

Or maybe there is long term storage in my brain some where and it just takes a while for things to get moved there. A philosophical question perhaps?

None of this would be a problem if I felt like I already knew everything I wanted or even needed to know. But no! There is a lot I still want to learn.

Hopefully I’m just tired and I’ll be fine by Monday. Or maybe I need some time off. Frankly I think that this mental reorganization is what vacations and to some extent sleep are for.  So maybe I should get to bed? :-) No time for vacation just yet.

Anyone else ever feel this way? Is it an age thing do you think? Or am I just mentally deficient? (A claim that I have heard in the past but usually from really stupid people. :-) )

Many years ago, long before most people had Internet access, I was involved in a great many online discussion forums on a company internal network. One of my friends and mentors back then was a man named Simon Szeto. Simon had been born in Hunan province in China, grownup up in Hong Kong and received his university training in the US. We both worked for the same US multi-national company at the time. He was based in Hong Kong at one point (prior to the UK handing Hong Kong back to China) and there were some issues that were creating quite a buzz at the time. Simon had opened an online forum to discuss the issue. Despite the fact that is was primarily a Chinese issue (I forget exactly what it was but I believe it had something to do with concerns about HK returning to China) most of the comments were coming from Americans and Europeans. Simon asked me to help moderate the discussion because the time difference meant that many potential troublesome comments were coming way outside his awake hours.  This was an interesting learning experience for me on several levels. But one thing sticks out above all.

I asked Simon why there was such an imbalance in where the comments were coming from. His reply was “The difference between Chinese people and Americans is that when the Chinese people have nothing to say they say nothing.”

Now I am an American and it is quite true that I have a lot of trouble keeping quiet. Like all too many Americans I seem to always want to put in my 2 cents worth. This is no less true online than it is in person. Still since that early conversation years ago I have tried to only say something when I actually have something to say. With mixed success of course. I confess that too often I give in to the urge to add a “me to!” sort of reply to a post or to create such a post myself. I look at my blog and think “I need to say something today.” I look at Twitter and think “No one has heard from me today.” All with the self absorbed conceit that people are out there waiting for me to say something. It’s part of my personality.

But I also find that the people I respect the most, the people whose opinions/writings are the most useful to me are the people who avoid saying things when they have nothing to say.

The best blogs are not the ones who have ten posts a day or even those who post 6-7 times a week. They are the blogs where a post shows up only when the person has something of value to say – something that adds to the conversation in a material way. There are many prolific bloggers out there who are quoted and linked to regularly that I have just given up on following. The noise to value ration is just not there. Often I see the valuable information they post somewhere else long before it shows up there – Slashdot being a great example BTW. It will show up in the post of someone whose posting rate is lower but whose value proposition is higher.

As I find myself overwhelmed with blog posts to read – caused by insatiable curiosity rather than actual need – I find myself looking at dropping the most prolific of blogs and focusing on value. Does the blogger have something new, original,to say or do they have real added value for the conversation? Are they the first to break news in a new area with a good, fresh explanation of why it matters? Or do they say things even when they have nothing to say? That is the new criteria I am using to narrow down my RSS feeds.

At the same time I look at activity on this blog. I’m writing less. Is that good or bad? Hopefully it means I am wasting less time for people. I see that links to my blog are way down. Is that because I am falling into the trap of saying things when I have nothing to say? Could be. Is it because I am saying less? That could be as well. But the goal should not be to write for volume but for value. Perhaps if I focus on that this blog (and my others as well) will develop a value proposition that will get people to follow, comment and link. And that would be a good thing. But even if the traffic isn’t there the value of the blog to me as a person will be better if I use it only to add to the conversation, to clarify my own thinking with original thought and when I have nothing to say I say nothing. That’s my goal as I rethink and reinvest my time with this blog. Please feel free to keep me honest BTW.