Friday
A PeopleRank powers Twitter’s new user suggestions feature
Twitter is starting to give personalized recommendations for people to follow, as it pushes to increase retention of new users.
The company will suggest accounts based on who you currently follow and who those accounts follow, according to a blog post today. Users will also see recommendations for people to follow when they look at other Twitter users’ profiles.
It’s like a PeopleRank of sorts, a social play on Google’s original PageRank algorithm, but with humans at the center instead of web pages. Many startups and even larger companies are building variations of this for their consumer-facing products or to serve as a backbone for other services.
Two companies, Klout and PeerIndex, are building directories of experts and reports on how adept or influential people are social media. Another company, PeerPong, leverages Twitter and Facebook connections to figure out who to refer questions to in its Q-and-A system. Many real-time search engines, including Google’s, keep track of relationships between users to inform the relevance of their results too.
Author Archive
no responses - Posted 07.30.10
The biggest of the independent real-time search engines, OneRiot, restructured its management today and laid off an unknown number of employees, including the company’s co-founder Robert Reich. Kimbal Musk, a serial entrepreneur who served as chief executive, is stepping aside to serve as chairman and making way for longtime president Tobias ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.30.10
Google said access to its search properties is normal and hasn’t been blocked. A spokesperson told us: “Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.23.10
Under stress from heavy World Cup traffic, Twitter fell to the bottom of the rankings that compare site load times and reliability for social networks, according to AlertSite today. “Performance dropped significantly compared to Q1,” the company said. “The time it took the website to load nearly doubled, and availability slipped ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.23.10
Facebook is adding commenting, a much-requested feature to the “like” button it has spread across millions of sites. Before, publishers had to choose between the older “Share” button, which had comments, and the new “Like” button, which didn’t. If you’ve implemented the iFrame version of the button and want to enable ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.23.10
If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities. A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.22.10
Mark Zuckerberg and “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick met for an on-stage conversation this evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Zuckerberg was much more relaxed, less sweaty and nervous than the last time he was on a public stage in the U.S. at the d8 conference in ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.21.10
Mark Zuckerberg said that he was “quite sure” he didn’t sign any documents in 2003 that could have potentially handed over a majority stake in Facebook during an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC World News today. A lawyer for the company yesterday said that she was “unsure” whether Zuckerberg signed ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.21.10
Twitter and Foursquare investor Fred Wilson shrugged off Facebook’s open graph, it strategy for mapping the web via people’s relationships and tastes, and called Apple evil for its increasing control over devices and the mobile ecosystem. “Facebook is a photo-sharing site, really. Maybe with some chat attached to it,” Wilson said ...continue
no responses - Posted 07.21.10
Twitter and Foursquare investor Fred Wilson shrugged off Facebook’s open graph, it strategy for mapping the web via people’s relationships and tastes, and called Apple evil for its increasing control over devices and the mobile ecosystem. “Facebook is a photo-sharing site, really. Maybe with some chat attached to it,” Wilson said ...continue