Need to map an ad hoc list of tweeps attending a map or conference? This is your tool! Just give the map a name, add some tweeps, then share new maps the URL.
Examples:
a) map of some tweeps attending the SUXORZ panel during SMWNYC in February 2010.
b) map of some tweeps attending the AnalyticsCamp at Chapel Hill, February 6, 2010.
The Watch List will notify you when two or three tweeps you've targeted jointly follow someone new.
Good for finding rising stars in an industry, a competitor's new customer, or a new hire in a company.
We DM you personal updates weekly after your target tweeps follow someone new.
To create a watch list, click "create a watch" at the top of the table after you've Twiangulated "common friends." To edit past Watches, click the "Watch List" link top right on most pages.
Want to know who matters to someone?
It's usually not the biggest tweeps someone follows -- heck almost everyone follows @BarackObama, @PerezHilton and @Mashable.
It's the smallest, the tweeps with just 36 or 281 followers.
In the "under the radar" list, you more likely find a tweeter's lawyer, sister, high school BFF, 40-something-mentor-just-getting-on-twitter, and/or cubicle-mate.
Mapping those people often yields the most meaningful insights into a tweeter's social graph.
This search shows which influential followers that two or three tweeps have in common.
(To eliminate the noise of the millions of spam tweeps and focus on intentional follows, we limit the results to tweeps who follow fewer than 11k people who have 1.5 times more followers than friends.)
This search can help reveal who cares about the same set of ideas, domain of information, or corporate structure. This can be a good place to find new people follow.
The people on this list may not be stars, but they've made follow decisions that suggest they feel strongly about a person or topic.
Use this search to determine who two or three tweeps follow in common. This is the killer search if you want to understand a social graph.
* Enter the names of three senior people at a given company and you not only get the names of almost everyone (with a Twitter account) who works with them, but you can see who the smallest player is who has their ear.
* Enter three experts' names and you can see who they all rely on for news and information.
* If you're looking to recruit within a given company, mapping the cross section of tweeps followed by three people in that company uncovers lots of additional players, some of whom have lots of influence.
Is a man with a 4.0 GPA and a masters degree in education likely to be better at teaching in an inner city school than a woman with a BA in history who had a 2.5 GPA in her first two years of college and a 4.0 her junior and senior year?
All other things being equal, the slacker-turned-star history major is probably the better teacher.
Teach for America, which last year sent 4,100 recent college graduates to teach at schools in lower-income neighborhoods, has turned hiring great teachers into a science. In this month's Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley does a tremendous job profiling TFA and what it has learned about what makes a great teacher.
Each year TFA evaluates 35,000 applicants on 30 different datapoints. After their hires have taught for a year, TFA cross-references these characteristics against how much each teacher's students have advanced during the year.
What to look for in hiring an aspiring teacher? According to Ripley, TFA looked at the data it's been gathering on job candidates since 1990 and identified these qualities as correlating strongly with a recruit's success:
Grit: "those who initially scored high for 'grit' -- defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-chosce test-- were 31% more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students."
Happiness: Teachers who reported they were very content with their lives were 43% more likely to achieve great results in the classroom.
Achievement: "Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teacher. And the two best metric of previous success tend to be grade-point average and 'leadership achievement' -- a record of running something and showing tangible results." But a 4.0 isn't essential: "an applicant's college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college."
XX chromosomes: It turns out "women are more likely to be effective in Teach for America."
TFA also discovered that two factors that were expected to predict successful teaching -- prior experience working in poor neighborhoods or a masters in education -- had no correlation with classroom success.
All these characteristics are hard for a teacher to change post-facto. But it turns out there are a bunch of strategies that teachers can learn. These are detailed in a new book called Teaching as Leadership by Steven Farr, a former TFA teacher who now studies exceptionally effective TFA teachers.
According to Ripley, in studying TFA's best teachers, Farr found that "great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.... Great teachers, he concluded, constantly re-evaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully -- for the next day or the year ahead -- by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."
Does all this work? By refining its hiring and teacher training, TFA has nearly doubled the number of its teachers who advance their students more than 1.5 educational years in a single school year.
One last resource: TFA's strategies for teachers are promoted at teachingasleadership.org.
"The way to kill a newspaper is to ask more for less," says legendary newsman Sir Harold Evans in his autobiography My Paper Chase.
The New York Times should remember Sir Harold's rule as plans to erect a paywall around its online content in January 2011.
The paywall means not just that readers will pay more, but that they'll get less. How? The New York Times currently is a must-read for any card-carrying member of the commercial, media, entertainment, educational, and government elites. The paper is read, in part, because everyone reads it. (Or at least claims to.)
With fewer post-paywall readers, the site will become less relevant, less essential. Which means NYT.com will cost more for less.
[Update 1/27/10: News that Newsday, a daily focused on Long Island, has gotten just 35 paid subscribers to its site since launching a paywall in late October certainly confirms Sir Harold's rule. Newsday.com's $5 per week online subscription seems reasonable -- little more than a Starbucks coffee, right?]
So how might NYT add value online even as it raises prices?
It should make its smaller, more dedicated audience part of the value proposition. [Update: Newsday.com reports that its readership has fallen 50%, but argues that since these online readers are all also local print readers, they're of higher value to advertisers. In theory, they're also of higher value to each other.]
* The company should spend the next twelve months ramping the social network already nascent among its readers, writers, editors and partners.
* Some of these social functions could be built in-house, others should be bolted on from LinkedIn and Facebook Connect. (Copy half of what Huffpo does.)
* Think intra-member messaging, micro-conferences, membership schwag, rankings.
* Let members earn points -- think Foursquare or American Express -- that earn them more prominence in the community and/or face-time with Times' talent.
* Emulate a savvy party promoter: comp the people -- pundits, activists, students, community leaders, mavens, industry figures, teachers -- who will add life to the party.
* As with the planned content wall, drive-by readers should be able to sample snippets from within the social network (reading comments for example), but would not get inside the site's functionality to really participate in the social mix.
With some luck and a good feature set, the newspaper's prodigious reporting and analysis would become the bait for people to come to NYT.com, and the people themselves and their insights are the velcro that keeps them around.
In a world deluged with opinions, rumors, factoids and billions of pixels pumped out by anybody with a cellphone, smart Times readers might pay to brainstorm and network with a self-selected community of other discerning news patrons and producers.
Repositioning its paywall as a velvet rope might raise the value of NYT.com enough to justify raising prices.
Yes, this would be a radical revision of the Times and its mission. Surely Sir Harold, hater of class snobbery and champion of a newspaper's duty to be an open forum and spokesman for non-elites, would abhor the idea of ClubNYT.com. As a former journalist, I don't don't find the idea entirely palatable either.
But as an entrepreneur, I'd say ClubNYT.com's odds of success are better than 50/50.
And those odds are fifty times better than those of NYT's current plan to charge more for its soup while diluting the product. That, with apologies to Sir Harold, seems like a great way to kill a website.
Last week we soft-launched a bunch of new features to help you untangle the mysteries of who is who on Twitter.
You can now:
a) Identify an individual's most influential followers. Wonder who's really influential? This is your search. In theory this search is "biggest followers," except we've weeded out all those people who follow more thatn 11k, figuring those follows are automatic or spam. Whatever they are, they're not meaningful. What remains are pure influentials. For example, here are my most influential followers.
b) Identify an individual's smallest friends. We figure that the smallest tweeps that a big tweeter follows are probably some of the most personally relevant to that person. For example, here are @GStephanopoulos's smallest friends.
c) Identify the biggest followers of two or three tweeps. I'm still trying to figure out why this is actually useful, but several people have asked for it, so we've done it. For example, wonder who the 456 people are who follow @dsearls, @davewiner and @dweinberger in common?
As always, you can still do the "who do a + b + c follow?" search to get a list of incredibly relevant people you might want to follow within a given company or industry or neighborhood.
Want to help test a new service we’re coding? Drop me a line and I’ll get you a beta code for Twiangulate.
The service is simple, something we originally designed for staff use.
Exhausted by plowing through lists of hundreds of people who our favorite tweeters follow, we rigged Twiangulate to (you guessed it) triangulate: create a short list of interesting people by comparing two or three target Tweeters’ followees.
The process combines the robustness of code with the discernment of hand-sorting.
Here are a few pre-baked lists:
Politicos: @benpolitico + @jmartpolitico + @AriMelber
Open gov geeks: @cjoh + @ellnmllr + @bill_allison
Reason editors, past and present: @nickgillespie + @mleewelch + @vpostrel
Turns out that AriMelber, benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow 34 people in common. AriMelber and benpolitico follow another 24 in common. AriMelber and jmartpolitico follow another 47. And benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow a separate set of 53.
If you’re a DC-news geek, charting who is on one list but not the others is fascinating.
Does anyone else care? Maybe not.
Twiangulate’s ambitions aren’t huge. We’re just trying to help people more efficiently figure out who their friends, enemies and peers are following. Twiangulate augments Twitter’s SUL and its new “user generated” Lists, which offer essentially monocular snapshots of a dynamic, multi-dimensional world.
Taking a more social approach, Twiangulate aggregates the wisdom of small crowds.