Blog-indexing service Spinn3r announced today that for their new 3.1 release, they will offer support for the Twitter firehose - that's right, the entire public Twitter stream - as well as social media rankings.
The Twitter firehose feed content will belong to a new microblog designation that Spinn3r will also use for indexing other microblogging services. The rankings will consider the relationships and links between users and determine the top 10,000 accounts over four social and link-sharing networks.
]]> The Twitter firehose API is a sample of the full Twitter feed. Now that it's part of what Spinn3r "listens to," this is the breakdown by Spinn3r-indexed service by volume of posts (as opposed to volume of actual posted content or word count):
The rankings cover FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, and Delicious. Unfortunately, there is no "harmony of the rankings." Each service has its own top-users list. From the Spinn3r blog:
"Sources are ranked by authority whereby the more friends or inbound links you have, the higher your rank... We do not consider raw inbound link count to be an accurate representation of authority. This is highly vulnerable to spam and rank errors as users who attract a large number of links (either through black hat methods, link baiting, or viral marketing) can inflate their rankings..."
"We consider the quality of inbound links to be far more important... The authority for a source is not a direct function of raw inbounds links. Some users can have high authority but very few (relative) inbound links."
The algorithm also considers interactions between friends within networks and connections to "seed" users who were hand-picked based on their in-network clout. Neither Twitter nor Facebook has been fully indexed or ranked yet, but the Spinn3r rankings site says this is a mere matter of time.
This first version of the rankings is published manually and only once; future support will be determined based on user reactions. Spinn3r also hopes to add rankings by vertical to determine the strongest users in political, technological, and other fields.
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