Four short links: 14 December 2010

Twitter Influence, Open Source Visualized, Arduino Autopilot, and Customer Respect

  1. The Million Follower Fallacy (PDF) — We found that indegree represents a user’s popularity, but is not related to other important notions of influence such as engaging audience, i.e., retweets and mentions. Retweets are driven by the content value of a tweet, while mentions are driven by the name value of the user. Such subtle differences lead to dissimilar groups of the top Twitter users; users who have high indegree do not necessarily spawn many retweets or mentions. This finding suggests that indegree alone reveals very little about the influence of a user. Research confirms what we all knew, that idiots who chase follower numbers have the influence they deserve. (via Steve O’Grady on Twitter, indirectly)
  2. Geocoding Github: Visualizing Distributed Open-Source Development — work for the Stanford visualization class, plotting open source commits on maps over time. See this page for the interactive explorer. (via Michael Driscoll on Twitter)
  3. ArduPilotMega 1.0 Launched — autopilot built on the Arduino platform. (via Chris Anderson on Twitter)
  4. Lessons of the Gawker Security Mess (Forbes blog) — nice deconstruction of what happened. In the chat, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, after hearing that it is just Gawker users who have been compromised, remarks “oh, well. unimportant”. Gawker’s Richard Lawson wants to know if the breach is limited to “just the peasants?” Don’t trash talk about your users in company channels. The business that forgets it lives and dies on its customers is a business that will eventually be hated by its customers. (via Nahum Wild on Twitter)
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