Twitter Recommendation Engine: Part 2
Last summer I built a little recommendation engine for people to follow on Twitter. I’ve been meaning to build a new one since Twitter added the ability for users to group people into lists. Well, this past week I finally found some time to give it a try. For comparison, here’s my new top 40 suggestions (again, *’s are people that I don’t currently follow):
I can also target specific users.
Followers of John Resig (jQuery) might like:
codinghorror
kevinrose
kevinmarks
spolsky
yahoo
dondodge
stephensaber
scottdlowe
adenhepburn
ryan
Followers of Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) might like:
BillGates
ioerror
beltzner
GoogleCode
BoingBoing
grantbow
Ben_Teitelbaum
googlemaps
googleapps
mozillaweb
Honestly, it’s not as good as I expected. Just glancing over the results, I don’t think it’s as good as the follower based version from last year. Part of the problem could be list spammers, part could be that I don’t do anything do dilute the influence of people that create a lot of very broad lists, and part could be that Twitter has changed. I’d really like to try a blended version that uses both lists and followers.
February 7th, 2010 at 2:57 am
Hi Aaron,
Can you use your algorithm and suggest me a list of people I should follow? My id is @gauravgupta
You can publish it as a reply to this comment.
Thanks
Gaurav Gupta
February 7th, 2010 at 10:17 am
I limited it to only look at a few lists per person you follow. It just takes too long to run otherwise (it still took several hours). Anyway, here’s your list:
iamsrk
juniorbachchan
realpreityzinta
FarOutAkhtar
geneliad
Riteishd
deepikatweeting
anaggh
googlewave
GuyKawasaki
anandmahindra
TweetDeck
ActorMadhavan
tinucherian
MallikaLA
TheOnion
twibes
Googletech
mahafreed
iphone_dev
vivek_oberoi
guardiantech
February 7th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the list!
I am from India and I see a lot of Indian celebrities in the ID’s your algorithm has suggested me! Nice!
The reason why I got so excited on seeing your blogpost is because I also started off trying to make my own Twitter recommendation engine a few weeks back (with a slightly different algorithm though) but the API limits were a bummer! So I never ended generating even my own list
Keep up the good work.
Gaurav Gupta