I read this interesting approach being used to rank FriendFeed users. The ranking is based on Google's search results page and is therefore a mix of FriendFeed linking and webpage links. I had been running a small crawl of FriendFeed users for the past couple of days. I started at Bret Taylor, one of the founders and followed all the users he subscribes to and went from there to discover more users, based only on the subscriptions. The crawl hasnt finished yet and there are roughly 22,000 user's subscriptions that I have fetched (so far). Nevertheless, the graph that I found so far can be used to compute the PageRank of users based on who subscribes to whom. Following are the top 10 users based on PageRank from the subscription graph.
Take these results with a grain of salt. Firstly, because the crawl is incomplete and secondly because I think that rather than subscriptions the comment network says more interesting things. That said, what really surprised me about the top users is that I would have expected it to be dominated by the regular Blogosphere rockstars (aka A-Listers), but there are new faces up there -- more evidence that A-List is dead! People care more about interesting stuff and not the celebrity status of a handful and FriendFeed is a perfect place for finding and surfacing new stuff.
I am collecting "comments" and "likes" statistics from the crawl. We can similarly compute the PageRank over the comments graph. This is a fantastic dataset and has some wonderful properties, rating (ie likes) and temporal data.
As and when the crawl finishes, I will try to crunch it and post a few interesting nuggets.
How interesting! It's weird to be included on that list (and cool!) - I'm willing to put money on the fact that once the crawl is complete and the comment analysis is done I won't be anywhere near the top ten.
You frickin' guys amaze me with the things you are able to do - part of me wishes I would have learned to program but I also know its not my natural inclination.
That's the great thing about FF - constant exposure to new and fascinating people and sources of information.
Thanks for taking the time to do all of this so that we could all benefit from your hard work!
Posted by: Marco | July 25, 2008 at 04:01 PM
Even though the crawl isn't complete, I can definitely see Thomas Hawk staying in the top spot. Photographers produce the best content= Pictures, so this is a no brainer. The A-list isn't dead when you haver a blogger that takes photos...
Posted by: Anthony Farrior | July 25, 2008 at 04:51 PM