New facets in TweetPivot and discovering Kryten likes fast cars too

TweetPivot is used to filter and sort Twitter friends, followers or lists from multiple angles or facets. The original set of facets included Followers Count, Klout Score, Klout Class, and Location. Recently TweetPivot added two new facets to its collections: 'Member Since' and 'Tweets Count', which allow you to visualise the spread of Twitter longevity and activity-levels, and slice and dice Twitter data using these criteria.

We have analysed the 2000+ Followers for @bloodhound_ssc (the supersonic car that aims to go 1000 mph and inspire the next generation to study STEM - science, technology,

engineering and mathematics) using Klout scores and the new facet 'Member Since'. Below is a screen-shot of the collection sorted by year of joining Twitter.

Zooming in to the 83 followers who joined Twitter in 2007, the monthly distribution can be seen:

Keeping the 2007 filter on, if we sort by Klout score, then we can see that there is a spread of klout scores, with 0-10 being most prevalent (perhaps surprising for a group who have been twittering for so long?).

Zooming in on the guy with the most klout, we see that it is bobbyllew (Robert Llewelyn), otherwise known as the android Kryten from one of my favourite TV programs Red Dwarf.

I once saw Robert Llewelyn give an after dinner speech, and I am tickled to discover that we're both fans of Bloodhound_SSC, in fact, I think I'll go join his list of followers now.

Give TweetPivot a whirl and see who you discover. Please leave a comment if there are additional facets you'd like to see in the future.

Twitter Elite Women

Earlier today Twitter Grader published a list that, according to their scoring system, contains The 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter. Here at TweetPivot we thought it would be interesting to add them all to a public twitter list and then create one of our collections from it.

You can browse the TweetPivot collection here.

We've actually only managed to explore 97 of the 100 as 2 didn't exist (@x_tinaaa08 & @miss_gorgeous88) and 1 was protected (@laniar). In addition to our usual data we've also added in their rankings ('Elite Women Position'). So, what did we learn?

Firstly we sorted by Klout Class. This gives a good indication of the 'twittergraphic' makeup of our collection. Straight away it's evident that there're an unusually high number of 'Thought Leaders' and 'Taste Makers' in this group. Hardly surprising, though, as this is not a randomly selected set.



Secondly we selected the top 10 women based on Klout Score to see how this compared to the Twitter Grader ranking. 9 are reasonably matched but one (@Melanie_putria) is a big outlier. She scores an impressive 62.9 on the Klout Score, yet is position 83 on the Twitter Grader scale!



Next up we selected the top 10 women as ranked by Twitter Grader and then sorted them by the Klout Score. We can see that, even though all these women score a 'flat' 100 in the published list they have a much more normally distributed set of Klout Scores. We'd be interested to know if Twitter Grader have hit a ceiling?



The number of status updates (tweets) posted by the women has a nice slope to it - apart from the clear winner, @yeagerhood, with a whopping 132,374!



Pretty much all of the top 100 women are based in the US, with almost a third in California. Any surprises? Probably not.

We'd love to hear what insights other people can gain from this collection - post them in the comments please.

New: Save Twitter Lists Interactively Created with TweetPivot

Feedback from some newcomers to TweetPivot ran along the lines of:

"cool use of technology that's of interest to the curious looking for insights into their twitterverse"

However, when they were asked to explain how they would use these insights, pausing and head-scratching ensued. We believe that, with the new ability to save twitter lists, we are a step closer to making TweetPivot a useful, reusable tool...

Many Twitter users recognise that building up highly-customised Twitter lists is a great route to managing the firehose of Twitter information and maximising the relevance of updates they receive. However, it is time-consuming to build a custom list one person at a time, and simply adopting a large list from another Twitter user may leave you drowning in tweets. TweetPivot can help by making it easy to interactively chop down existing lists to increase their relevance. New functionality allows you to save the results as a custom Twitter list to be picked up by your favourite Twitter client.

If you've already tried TweetPivot, then you'll know that it enables you to interactively explore friends, followers and lists for any unprotected Twitter account and graphically identify a subset of people based on criteria such as location and influence (as measured by Klout). In the latest release of TweetPivot you can now save the results of your pivot exploration as a Twitter list.

To give it a go:

1. Go to the TweetPivot website
2. Pick a Twitter account of interest
3. Pivot its friends, followers or one of its lists
4. Interactively select a subset of interesting people
5. Save as a new list
6. Receive relevant tweets in Twitter or your favorite Twitter client

Follow @TweetPivot for updates, including an announcement of a upcoming video of how to use the new functionality.

TweetPivot goes Interactive!

We published a new feature today that has gotten us very excited at TweetPivot. Tanya Morton will be publishing a post later today that discusses more of the benefits but, for now, here's the mechanics.

Over the past few weeks thousands of people have been using our software to investigate collections of twitter users; but it's been a read-only process. Now, once you've found a subset of interesting users, we'll allow you to save them 'en masse' to one of your Twitter Lists.

This does require that you grant us access to your Twitter account but I've already blogged about what we will and won't do with that trust here.

This is what the new interface looks like - note the new button at the top 'Save Users to a Twitter List'. I've already filtered the collection so that it just contains people that Klout considers to be Socializers.



The first time you click this new button you'll need to tell Twitter that we can access your account details.



Clicking the 'Login via Twitter' link will redirect you to a page owned by Twitter where you can enter your username and password. Note: we don't ever know what your password is. All we need is the 7 digit number that Twitter gives you which you should enter in the textbox marked 'PIN'. If you keep the 'Follow @tweetpivot' checkbox ticked you'll be able to keep informed about improvements to our service, but you are free to uncheck this. Click OK to move onto the List Selector screen...



If you've already created the list you want to add your selection to, just click OK. Alternatively, click the 'New List' button to create one...



Click OK and TweetPivot will start working. You'll see a 'busy' graphic at the top of the TweetPivot window but you can still continue to manipulate the whole collection you loaded.



Finally, we'll show you a notification window telling you that all the selected users are now in the list. You then have the option to automatically jump to that list on Twitter.com.

We hope you have as much fun using this feature as we had building it!

How we treat your authentication at TweetPivot

A few weeks ago I posted an article on my personal blog entitled 'Social Network Authorisation Needs to Change'. In it I vented my frustration at the liberties some 3rd-party Twitter sites take with the trust given to them by interested users. Today, TweetPivot has launched a new feature that, in order to be used, requires our users to grant us access to their accounts. So, I wanted to publicly declare what we will and won't do with the authorisation you grant us to your Twitter account.

What we will do

1. We will tell your account to follow @tweetpivot during login if, and only if, you tell us that's OK.
2. We will read the names and member counts of lists, both public and private, that you have created when you need this information to make informed decisions.
3. We will create new lists, either public or private, upon your specific request.
4. We will add users to lists you create when requested to do so.

What we will NOT do

1. We will NOT post unsolicited tweets in your name.
2. We will NOT access any part of you Twitterverse not mentioned in the previous list.
3. We will NOT retain the authorisation details beyond a specific session. In other words, when you close your browser TweetPivot's access is terminated.

As more features are added to TweetPivot we will need to amend these 2 lists; but we will do so publicly.

We hope that this starts a positive trend followed by all 3rd-party Twitter apps to declare, and stick to, their intentions.