Sifting Authorities From Celebrities On Twitter

holy_calamity writes "Celebrities like Britney Spears may be the 'most followed' on Twitter, but new service PeerIndex mines the content of tweets and tracks the spread of links and phrases to reveal the hidden experts in specific areas, from cloud computing to venture capital. The authorities the site finds for a given subject often have only a few hundred followers, but the content of their tweets is known to spread widely. Could data mining tools like this be the future for people or businesses looking for new collaborators, advisers and influencers?"

If you want idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you want collaborators, advisers and influencers that are idiots and use Twitter.

Could data mining tools like this be the future?

[madddddddddd]

RT: @slashdot: no.

Twitter Twaddle

[Frosty Piss]

Pretty much. The idea that anyone would go to Twitter for "experts" is, well, staggering. Twitter content it pretty much Twaddle.

Re:Predicted

[blair1q]

Marshall McLuhan said "The Medium is the Message" nearly half a century ago.

Re:Predicted

[Anonymous Coward]

Stating anything in 140 character tweets give what kind of message?

Twitter is nothing but a circle jerk.

Re:If you want idiots

[General Wesc]

Yeah, only dumbasses like Tyler Cowen and Aza Raskin.

There may not be much expert discussion on Twitter, but when you dogmatically insist that everyone on Twitter is an idiot you're actually identifying only one person as an idiot.

Re:Twitter Twaddle

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... Twitter doesn't have friends. It has followers. There's a difference.

Yes there is, just not one that's applicable in this context.

Re:Predicted

[DeadDecoy]

That's certainly a possibility, but tweeting a hyperlink seems like adding a superfluous layer of indirection when google and google scholar already do a pretty good job of looking up people by topic. But, to be fair, I wouldn't know if useful information can be extracted from tweets until it's done.

Re:Twitter Twaddle

[Anonymous Coward]

You're saying that Slashdot users are neither capable of following nor of being followed?

Sort of. I think you know exactly what I meant and are just mugging for the word 'Insightful' to appear next to your name.

The funny thing is your pedanticism is simultaneously sucking the fun out of my joke and illustrating why it's funny. Kudos!

Re:Twitter Twaddle

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never used it have you? I now have the ability to instantly follow, and communicate with, all the experts in my field as if they were my co-workers. I know what they are reading about and what new technologies they are employing, instantly. No other exchange mechanism has been this easy to use and this powerful.

Really? Did you miss the whole USENET thing? Newsgroups are far more powerful, far more directed, and just as fast.

It takes a deft hand to chose the right people to follow, true,

Not really a problem with newsgroups.

Yes, Twitter is just a fad. I imagine it'll suffer the same fate as USENET, only sooner.

Re:Twitter Twaddle

[Serious Callers Only]

A more significant issue with this and any other measure of competence based on popularity is that being expert and being popular/linked to are not remotely connected.

Expert != popular
Expert != well liked
Expert != referenced hundreds of times by people who know nothing about the domain

Expert, at least in the old-fashioned sense, means knowledgable and skilled in a particular domain.

The reason twitter is full of twaddle is that the minds of most people, collectively, are full of twaddle, and they like it that way.

Just as slashdot attracts a certain sort of internet blow-hard pontificating on the inferiority of others, so twitter attracts those in search of trivia and light relief, mingled with the occasional interesting link. I use both sites :)