a broken thought

I’ve been working on a little Python script¹ using the Twitter API that can recommend people for me to follow.  Here’s the basic idea:

1. Get the list of people that I currently follow.
2. Get a list of people who follow them. (I currently truncate this list at 100 followers per person to try to keep any one person from being too over represented, and to keep the run-time down.)  This list represents “people like me” because they have the same interest.
3. For all of the people like me, look up who they follow (again limited per person for the sake of time).
4. Score², sort, and print these “votes.”  These are the recommendations.

So far, it works pretty well.  About half of the top 40 results are people that I already follow, and the others do look like people that I’d be interested in following (some of which I have followed periodically).  Here’s what it came up with so far (*’s are the suggested new people to follow):

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