Twitter Reputation Ranking ...Hurry Up Already!!

Waaay back in early May (2009) Twitter announced that it was making several updates, and one of them was a reputation ranking system. Since then I have not heard anything about this. At least leak some of the details on how you see this working, maybe put them out there to the community perhaps and let them improve upon it.

Pardon the impatience Twitter, but you brought that on yourself by helping make an already speedy world to practically instantaneous. There are already numerous applications out there that claim to provide a Twitter ranking, but all of the ones that I have found only cover a particular 1 – 2 metrics at most so unless you can mash them all together (…hey app guys, do that) then all we have is a fragmented ranking system that does us no good.

I guess in the meantime I will just make assumptions on what will go into this ranking system and kill time by making some recommendations on what the system should include.

I think it is a given that the ranking system will largely based on an algorithm that relies on quantitative data. The following seem like logical metrics to incorporate for this (ranked in order of importance & therefore order of weight allocated to it in the algorithm):

• # of Followers
• # of Original Tweets
• # of RTs of your Original Tweets
• # of Blocks against you
• # of Original Tweets that get Favorited
• # of Click-Thrus on Original Tweets w/ links
• # of #Hashtags associated with you
• # of Original #Hashtags you create
• …handful of other quant that trail off

I seriously HOPE that part of the logic that makes up the system will somehow rely on the community for some qualitative aspect of the ranking. Some of the things I would like to see in this area are:

• Thumbs Up/ Thumbs Down style of community voting per tweet – I know you can “Favorite” but what if I think a tweet is lame …I should be able to vote that as such
• Whether the user produces content (blog, site, facebook, etc) other than tweets – No offense to those that just tweet, but it seems logical that the people who are part of the 1% of Internet that actually produces original content should be given a bump in their credibility/rep
• Google the user – If you can google the user’s name and they (or some content asset they produced or are mentioned in) come up in the top 20 search results they should get a rep boost
• Reviews – People should be able to post reviews of a particular twitter user. Sort of like Mr. Tweet, Yelp, etc.

If Twitter can figure out how to make the qualitative tools I mentioned (and/or other ideas smarter than mine) into a simple tool that a user can turn to when they are considering following someone, it will greatly improve upon what the ranking system could yield with just quantitative metrics.

….Still waiting Twitter. Hurry the heck up already.

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