We have just released a major upgrade of twitto.be which introduces the following improvements:
- multi-dimensional filtering: you can now combine filters on topic, location and language.
- new influence ratings: we now use Klout as the influence score rather than Kred.
- updated categorization system.
The aim of this new version is to improve the user experience and let visitors browse the twittos using powerful filters, while providing statistics on the population. Kudos to Panos who did most of the web development on twitto.
New features
Powerful filters
We’ve introduced three charts shown at the side of the page. They display statistics about the data you are looking at and act as filters. Each bar on the bar charts, and the provinces in the map are clickable and trigger filters that update the current page.
Used together, we can get some interesting insights from them, notably the prevalence of dutch-speaking twittos.
Klout scores and ranks
Klout is a pioneer in measuring of social media influence. The concept is controversial, and accuracy of such scores is relative. We started twitto using Kred as it provides a twitter-only breakdown of the social influence, whereas Klout may take activity of other social media (Google+, linkedIn, …) into account for some users.
But, Kred is not perfect either though. It seems to provide high scores very easily. While this may be flattering for some people, this makes it difficult to identify actual influencers. On the technical side, we also had performance and reliability issues with Kred which mean that it was difficult to keep your scores up-to-date.
For those interested, we’ll publish a series of posts comparing the social media influence measuring systems in future, stay tuned.
Topics
The 5 previous categories have been replaced with 9 categories, some of them quite generic (entertainment, business), some other more niche (design, health). This let’s us categorize new people more easily.
Participate
Add yourself to the directory
If you are missing from the directory and would like to appear, just ping us on twitter, or use the feedback form on twitto.be and we will add you.
Send feedback
We really do value feedback. You can either use the comments section below this post, the feedback button directly on twitto.be, or github issues for any remark.
Roll your own twitter users directory
Twitto.be is open source. You are free to use our code to create your own directory of twittos, maybe about a specific topic or around another location. Our Github repository contains all the website’s code.
Next steps
We’ll keep maintaining and enhancing twitto.be, but we are now focusing on tribalytics, a supercharged version of twitto aimed at helping marketers know their audience better and strategically plan their campaigns for maximum impact.