| The Twitter Following-Followers (TFF) Ratio |
| Wednesday, February 06 2008 |
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I mentioned in my previous post that Twitter makes it ridiculously easy to follow other people and for other people to follow you. Well, I've been running some numbers and have come up with the next great Web 2.0 statistic: the Twitter Following-Followers (TFF) Ratio (C) (R) (TM). See what I did there? That was legalese to say I copyrighted, registered, and trademarked the TFF Ratio, all at the same time from within this blog post (lawyers, pfft).
The formula is extremely complex. I spent an entire five seconds determining the proper algorithm, but that's only because I took a ton of statistics and triple-integral-derivative-matrixy stuff in college. Anyway, the formula looks like this:
TFF Ratio = Followers / Following
Don't worry, it's pretty simple when you break it into smaller pieces. Let's look at some examples:
My TFF Ratio = 49 followers / 64 following = .77
Guy Kawasaki's TFF Ratio = 3,750 followers / 3,961 following = .95
Major Nelson's TFF Ratio = 3,673 followers / 7 following = 524.71
Obviously the higher TFF Ratio you have the cooler you are, which doesn't say a whole lot about yours truly, but apparently says a lot about Major Nelson. There are other correlations and statistical-type things we could infer from those numbers and the TFF Ratio, but frankly I don't remember much about all that crap from college, so I'll do that thing that authors/speakers do when they don't know the answer: leave it to the reader/audience as a learning exercise.
The best part about the TFF Ratio? How long do you think it'll be before someone actually builds a web site/web service that uses the Twitter API to take in a username and returns the TFF Ratio? And then someone will use that service to build a shiny new mashup (Web 2.0 term) to compare all your friends' TFF Ratios with yours. I envision a shiny site badge that people will put on their blog to show off their TFF Ratio. And at conferences people will miss sessions because they were too busy comparing and dissecting TFF Ratios. You know it's gonna happen.
So for anyone out there that gets a hair to build such services and mashups, just remember that I copyrighted, registered, and trademarked the TFF Ratio, so expect to pay massive licensing fees.
5 comment(s) so far
Genius, pure genius. :-)
I just helped your ratio there, Dave.
Licensing? The community will come up with OSFFFT. It is basically:
OSFFFT = Following * Followers / Following^2
You see, the ^2 makes mine look smarter. Also, the OS means "Open Source", which means geeks will love it for its openness. :)
When you are right, you are right. http://TFFRatio.com/ />
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