Suggested User Presentations & Comments

I started this Experiment in Metrics way back in early April to see what I could deduce about the Twitter social network given all of the third party applications which are collecting large amounts of freely available data. It turned into a four week examination of the influence of the Suggested User list in determining who were the Most Followed people on Twitter.

It turns out that during the period of the project, 94% of the users on the Top 100 were Suggested Users and over 37% of the Top 500 had places on the Suggested User list. In fact all of the 228 Twitterers who appeared on the Suggested User list were on the Top 500 within 2 weeks of being selected. An overview of the project & a summary of its results were presented at Bar Camp NYC on 5/30/09. The segment was taped (39 minutes) and can be found at :

Bar Camp NYC Presentation

Five days after this presentation, I wanted to give a more elaborate talk at Social Media Camp (6/4/09) which was held during NYC's Internet Week. So I took the slides--which you can't really see in the broadcast--and expanded them to include an evaluation of whether given the goals of the Suggested User list, it could be called a success or failure. My conclusion is that it depends on whether you consider Twitter a Information Network, a Micro-Blogging Tool or a Social Network.

Here is the final presentation. Let me know if anything needs further explanation and I'd be happy to fill in the gaps.

The Power of Suggestion

View more OpenOffice presentations from Liz Pullen.