I’ve released a GreaseMonkey script Follow Rank and Follows in Common for Twitter User Profiles which you can use to display the Follows in Common and the Follow Rank for a given users profile page and discover how important they are in your Twitter Social Network.
Simmilar in aim to FaceBooks “friends in common”, adjusted to reflect twitter’s asymmetrical following as opossed to FaceBooks symmetrical Friending. i.e. in Facebook we both have to agree to be “Friends”, but it Twitter it only takes one of us to follow the other, following back is optional.
It order to use this script you need to have the GreaseMonkey extension installed, add the script, and then go to a users profile page on Twiiter.com, like Robert Scoble’s twitter page, (or Ashton Kutcher’s!)
FollowRank tells you how many, and which, of the people you follow are also following Robert Scoble (or Ashton Kutcher).
Follows in Common tells you how many, and which, of the people you follow are also followed by Robert Scoble (or Ashton Kutcher).
If you look at your own profile you will see a) 100% Follows in Common, b) How many of the people you follow who follow you back!

Notice the small gray down arrows? (This is visible if the result is none zero.) Clicking on the text line will reveal the avatar picture of the people who contribute to the score. Hovering over the picture will show their name and clicking on it open their user profile page (and compute their Follow Rank and Follows in Common).

Clicking on the text line a second time (see the small gray up arrows?) will collapse the view of Follow Rank or Follows in Common user avatar’s. The data is cached so reopening the view is super fast.
So Why Follow Rank?
This information lets me know this persons relevance and weight in my social network, the people I have choicen to follow (my first Order Social Network in Twitter).
It lets me know, quickly, why they discovered me, or why I might follow them.
How am I doing this?
All JavaScript, using the Twitter’s API calls for their Social Graph Methods (Twitter REST API Method: friends ids and Twitter REST API Method: followers ids), lots of caching of results (but only for a period of time using my aged Cache function – persistent, but not too persistent!! ) to get around the Twitter throttle limit (currently ~150 requests per hour limit, see Rate limiting), and lots of JSON AJAX calls of those api calls. Plus, taking advantage of Twitters.com’s use of jQuery on their web pages, their own plug-in’s and css and images. Easy!!
What’s next
There is still work to be done and features to be added add to the GM script (LiC : Lists in Common?), and then to go beyond what can be done in a GreaseMonkey script!
I’m thinking of exposing your 2nd order Twitter Social Network : Who are the people being followed by the people you follow? What’s their Follow Rank? Also, who of them follows almost the same people who follow?
I think this would make a organic “Suggested Users List”, personalized just for you because it based on your social network.
Now do that for your -1 & -2 order networks.
Plus sorting (by alpha, by Follow Rank, by FiC), and searching of all that.
This will keep me busy! Whatcha think?




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