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Recent work done at HP Labs, the exploratory and research group for Hewlett Packard, shows what most of us suspected as being true all all along; that just because a person has a lot of followers, it doesn’t mean they have a lot of influence.

In September 2009, using an algorithm they devised called the IP (Influence/Passivity) algorithm, a team of researchers from HP Labs continuously queried the Twitter Search API for 300 straight hours for all tweets containing the string of letters 'http'. Finding this string in a tweet would indicate the presence of a URL, and demonstrate that a web page was being shared or retweeted by means of a link.

In that time period, they acquired 22 million tweets with URLs present. This accounted for 1/15th of the entire activity of Twitter at the time. The URLs were checked for validity, and by revisiting the Twitter API they could determine who the user for each URL was, and in particular who their followers and followees were as well. From that information, a complete social graph was constructed from the dataset generated by the users sampled.

Recently, John Breslin, editor and publisher of Socialmedia.net, attended the federeated social web summit. A workshop held in Portland, Oregon. It was an invite only meeting which was denoted as being a “This is a “how” meeting, not a “why” or “whether to” meeting.”

The idea of the federated social web is to build upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate.

As John says, we get the chance to create technology that will “allow many different websites to talk to each other, to communicate, to exchange information.” The point of the summit was to find out “what sort of technologies are out there and what sort of standards are out there to exchange information back and forth.”

Thought leaders from a variety of social web companies and organisations will converge on Portland, Oregon this Sunday to discuss the "federated social web": an extension to the current social web, built upon various open web protocols, that will allow social websites to interoperate and better communicate with each other in a decentralised, distributed manner. (More details at the Federated Social Web Summit page.)

People attending the Federated Social Web Summit.

This is the first time that so many of the big players in this area will be in the same room together - Facebook, studiVZ, Google, Automattic, Diaspora*, Vodafone - to name but a few. I'll also be there representing the SIOC project initiated at DERI, NUI Galway. The event is being organised by status.net Inc., the company whose software powers Identica and many other microblogging services.

Organisations represented at the Federated Social Web Summit.

The Irish Twitter users who received the most replies from other Irish users during the study.

A research project by John Conroy, a Masters student supervised by Josephine Griffith at NUI Galway, has gathered some interesting statistics on Twitter usage and the most tweeted users in Ireland (during February / March 2010).

The study acquired 307,168 tweets from a group of Irish Twitter users. These tweets yielded 93,022 resolvable replies (@someuser), and another 7,298 retweets. Therefore, a third of the tweets investigated contained either a reply to another user or a retweet. Of the 93,022 resolvable replies, the vast majority were directed at users external to the Irish group. 15,364 replies (16.5%) were directed at an Irish user, and 77,658 (83.5%) at a user outside of Ireland. (Just over 2,000 investigated tokens were spoiled, often due to typos or e-mail addresses being detected as replies.)

Signups are now being accepted for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition, and data sets will be made available to verified accounts for download from the 1st September 2008.