@timbuckteeth (aka Steve Wheeler) tweeted his Twitter grade today (and beat me to a blog post that I got to know about via Twitter while writing this one here). It was at 67. In his blog post, Steve brings up examples of edubloggers that score much higher or are not found at all for no explainable reason. Thus, I can happily refer to his work without coming up with my own list. 🙂

However, while I was unaware of Steve’s post, I had already run the Twitter Grader on my account (yeah, I know, now it’s not only ego Googling but also ego grading 😉 ), and came up with a 47. That means that I “score higher than 47 percent of the other user profiles that have been graded.” Randomly running another account through the mill, I chose @gsiemens and he got a “0”. Wow. Surely, that must have been a mistake. After re-grading him because he can’t have such a low grade (and because I messed up my first 2 screencasts), he finally had a grade of 97.7. That is more like my perception of his Twitter activity. 😉

Now I was curious as to the methods used for the grading. The website only gives the following general information:

The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. […]

Your grade is calculated using a combination of factors including:

* The number of followers you have
* The power of this network of followers
* The pace of your updates
* The completeness of your profile
* …a few others.

The “a few others” are the bolts that make this interesting. What are these? How do they figure in? What were the selection criteria for the 36,133 ranks? What do these ranks represent? There are 3,134,420 accounts according to TwitDir (stats from today) that only lists public accounts. So how does it work? Or is it just a nice gadget that you try once, look at your rank, be (not so) happy and then never think back to it?

The grader does not return a pretty visualization to look at, but the final grade is already powerful in itself if you take it seriously and try to figure out what your grade actually means for your Twitter network.

I don’t really trust the calculations (which you should never do anyway unless you manipulated them yourself) because the ranking does not stop at 100. @Scobleizer, a high-flyer in terms of followers (34,968), following (20,991) and updates (14,402) got a rank of 100.3! Explain that to me please. 😉

On a lighter note and aside from statistics etc.: While you are waiting for the computing teacher to come up with your grade, you are treated to some human phrases instead of the usual “Loading…”.

The human in Twitter Grader (Flash required)

* … when it comes to Twitter?

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