Use this search to compare two or three tweeps and see who has the biggest set of followers.

Running a political campaign and want to know how your candidate is doing versus the other candidates? Think that @aplusk has the biggest followers even if @britneyspears has more followers? Want to know which social media influentials are listening to your competition but not you? This is the feature for you. After all, its not just the size of your following, its what you do with it.

To get a feel for how this works, compare @britneyspears, @aplusk and @theellenshow or @sarahpalinusa, @SenJohnMcCain and @newtgingrich or@HarvardBiz, @NintendoNews and @fastcompany or @gruber, @ginatrapani and @zeldman. As you'll see, the left-most column displays, in photo form, which of the three target tweeps an individual is following.

You can also use this feature to learn who your 100 biggest followers are just by entering your Twitter nickname in the first field.

If you want to book-mark this page, here's the URL: http://twiangulate.com/search/#biggest_followers

In returning these results, we ignore results containing tweeps who follow more than 11k people, figuring that those follow decisions don't reflect an actual interest in what his/her friends are tweeting.

With the NC U.S. Senate Democratic primary runoff one month away, candidates Cal Cunningham (@calfornc) and Elaine Marshall (@elaine4nc) are deadlocked in recent polls.

Is the race that close? With many pundits predicting low voter turnout, this election could very well be decided by the candidates’ social media clout.

Using Twiangulate, our tool for analyzing twitter friends and followers, we’ve looked at how the candidates stack up.

With 983 followers, Marshall is 28 followers ahead of Cunningham, who has 955 followers.

But Marshall, seasoned NC political insider, seems to have an edge in among influential followers, who include @KatrinaNation, the publisher and editor of The Nation magazine, prominent Durham-based LGBT blogger @Pam_Spaulding, Mother Jones reporter @SuzyKhimm and Politico reporter @davecatanese.

Cunningham, the fresh-faced JD and Iraq War vet, has a few interesting (and potentially influential) followers of his own. Prominent New York gay progressive blog @thejoshuablog follows Cunningham who is seen as the more conservative candidate.

It is no secret that Cunningham has the support of Democratic leaders in Washington and two Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee staffers, @ArjunJaikumar and @jasonrosenbaumare, among his biggest followers.

Both candidates have notable followers in common — NPR Political Editor @kenrudin, NC Public Radio reporter @LauraLeslie and former NC U.S. Senate candidate @JNealNC.

To see the full list of the two candidates’ most influential followers, check out this Gdoc.

And here are Cunningham and Marshall’s most influential followers broken out in more detail. (Influential is defined by Twiangulate to be tweeps who are followed by at least 1.5 times more people than they follow and who follow fewer than 11k people.)

And, for fun, here’s a list of the people they both follow in common.

Want to compare two or three Twitter Lists to discover who is listed in common? Who is left out? We've got the solution for you. Select the "Compare lists" tab, then input two or three lists. Then sit back and let Twiangulate take care of the rest.

A quick Taghive tabulation of tags used by SXSWers at yesterday's panels:

1. Media Armageddon (#endtimes): 257 tweets by 55 people
2. Danah Boyd keynote (#danahboyd): 186 tweets by 52 people
3. Getting Streamy (#gettingstreamy): 131 tweets by 42 people
4. Future of Influence(#futureofinfluence): 130 tweets by 43 people
5. Can the real time web be realized? (#realtimeweb): 106 tweets by 34 people

And here are SXSW hashtags for the last hour.

The biggest trending topic for day 1 of SXSW was "Battle decks" with 146 tweets by 37 people. "iPad" had 47 tweets by 37 people. (Leading tag cloud as of 7pm last night is below. For a sense of scale, the smallest on the graphic is "stuffwedesignfor" with 47 tweets by 9 people.)

After a tremendous coding push by Martin, Zsolt and Kristof over the last week, Taghive was functioning like a mind machete, clearing a path through the raucous jungle SXSW. Working late last night, Martin added "last day" and "last week" to the original "last hour" slice.

As I'd hoped, Taghive helped turn the firehose into a water fountain, organizing insights flooding out of various panels, spread between the Hilton and the convention center, into readable channels. Clicking from tag to tag during the day, I got a running summary of each panel. The tag cloud, with its swelling and contracting words, also signaled when a panel was suddenly heating up.

As @dhatfield tweeted earlier this week, "To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."

http://weblog.blogads.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Day-1-leading-topic-battle-decks-smaller.jpg

Let's see what day 2 brings.

Great HBR article on slicings and dicings and visualizations of Twitter's volcanic spew of content and data.

Needs some mention of Twiangulate tweep maps. :) For starters, here's a map of the connections among @Harvardbiz's 100 biggest twitter followers.

We've enabled search for Twitter bios. This should be useful for journalists and researchers trying to dig out new sources or to quantify the importance of a particular type of personality on Twitter. I've done some quick digging and turned up a bunch of fun factlets and trendoids.

Journalists and Twitter

For example, if you're an analyst trying to get a grip on which newspapers are making the biggest inroads on Twitter, you might be interested to note that the search for "New York Times" (x "author" and "bestseller) turns up 421 tweeps, while the same search for the Washington Post turns up only 247 tweeps. The same search for Wall Street Journal turns up 202 tweeps.

It's interesting to note that WSJ's top 50 tweeps are almost all "house" accounts -- for example "WSJ Health" and "WSJ Real Estate" -- rather than individual journalists.

Does this reflect a relative lack of name-brand journalists at WSJ versus NYT and WAPO, or, more likely, a WSJ corporate policy against professional tweeting? (And if the latter, is Rupert Murdoch seeking to keep his journalists from building cachet that would give them more leverage in haggling over salary?)

Causes and Twitter

What does it mean that 724 tweeps include NRA in their Twitter bios, while just 67 tweeps self-identify as Sierra Club members.

There are 6,240 "liberal" tweeps , 11,259 "conservative" tweeps, 4,234 "progressive" tweeps. 1,269 mention TCOT.

Cities

45,120 tweeps mention Boston while 33,666 mention Dallas. (Relative to population, Dallas should have roughly twice as many tweeps as Boston.)

Health

6,751 tweeps mention cancer in their bios, 1,155 mention diabetes

Sports

Fully 2,007 tweeps mention the Red Sox, overshadowed by the 3,110 tweeps mentioningYankee. 425 tweeps are Tarheels, 1,126 mention Harvard and 709 mention Yale.

Speaking of sports, 10,272 tweeps are runners, 8,167 tweeps mention tennis and 17,594 mention golf.

Created by Christopher Spenn:



Thank you @cspenn!

You can now map of Twitter Lists with Twiangulate.

For example, here's a map of Jeff Jarvis' Media Wonks list.  The full list of 192 tweeps doesn't map well -- this is an <strike>incestuous</strike> highly networked world.  So the map defaults to display only those tweeps with bilateral links (as opposed to a one directional follow) with more than 10% of the people on the list.

It's interesting to note that Jay Rosen, of NYC, is mutual friends with 88% of the people on the list.  There's lots of other good data to mine here -- we'll be getting to that soon.

To build a map, look for "Build a map" in the navigation cluster at the top of the page.  To view maps other people have built go to "Group maps."

Looking at efficient networks, Wired reports: "Tree branches have inspired efficient transit networks, but a new study
finds inspiration in leaves. The curvy, connected leaf veins found in
some plants are an efficient way to circumvent damaged areas and
channel nutrients, report researchers led by Eleni Katifori of the
Rockefeller University in New York City."