Barely 24 hours after Twitterank became (in)famous on the internet, Twitter and more importantly on ZDNET (Twitter Users - Beware of Twitterank!), Ryo Chijiiwa got in touch with Oliver Marks who allowed him to write a guest post at ZDNET so that we could see his side of the story.
I’m quoting select portions of his guest post here. You can read the entire post at ZDNET and also read his views on Twitterank and everything else on his blog.
Hi. My name is Ryo, and I’m the developer of Twitterank, which is not some grand scheme to steal thousands of Twitter accounts, but a casual experiment gone horribly horribly right. Here’s my side of the story:
With no more tales of Peter and Co. to entertain me, I turned to Twitter. I was browsing through a day’s worth of tweets from my friends, when something or another got me thinking about @replies. As many of you are aware, I’m sure, @replies allow users to essentially “send” tweets to other users, which effectively turns Twitter into one giant semi-public conversation. In my head, these @replies started looking like edges in a hidden graph. Hidden, because while you can see @replies directed at you, you can’t necessarily see @replies that other people are receiving. Yet, it seemed like this information would reveal quite a bit about the user. Who’s talking to them? How often?
He also talks about the “secwet” behind the ranking of Twitter users.
That, is the “secwet” behind Twitterank. Similar to how Google’s PageRank algorithm judged a web page based on the number of inbound links and the origin of those links, Twitterank attempts to quantify a Twitter user by analyzing their incoming @replies. In essence, the more people talk to you, the higher your score. So yes, the number you’ll get may not necessarily reflect the number of followers you have, how often you tweet, or even how big your ego is.
…… and why you need to enter your password on Twitterank and why it cannot be avoided.
That also brings us to passwords. In order to analyze your @replies, I need to make a web service request to Twitter, which requires your user name and password. As I’ve mentioned in my blog, there are alternative authentication mechanisms out there, but for whatever reason, Twitter hasn’t adopted them yet. So I went ahead and hacked together a simple app, which asked for a user name and password. Those of you who used the site early on might’ve seen a big red box with a rather lengthy warning about how “you should be afraid.” That text, which someone later found commented out and then misinterpreted, was there to prompt users to think twice before entering their passwords. If people were turned away by it, that would’ve been fine by me. Frankly, I only expected a few of my friends to use it.
Twitterank became famous for all the wrong reasons initially and these numbers speak for themselves. Twitterank took Ryo about 5 hours to build and in the first hour, it had 8 new users, the next hour it rose to 109, then 400, 1500, 2400 etc. I’m not sure
Now that Ryo’s come out and given his side of the story, Twitterank will get a lot more buzz than it got earlier, a lot more users and a lot more hits. But it always makes sense to be sure of what you are doing when you enter your username and password on new websites!
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Hi, My name is Narayanan and i'm your resident blogger. Technology and internet have always fascinated me and that's the reason behind the origin of this blog. Thanks for visiting Tech Spikes :)