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Who do the people of Twitter follow?

Monday, June 01, 2009 by Dave Winer.

During yesterday's discussion of Twitter's suggested user's list, I got an excellent suggestion from Sarah Delman, CEO of the news-oriented startup, Of Record, Inc.  

Here's the story... 

We've heard that the SUL is like the list of books that employees of a book store recommend to customers. So this raises the question -- which "books" do the employees of Twitter read -- i.e. who do they follow, and how does that correlate to the list of Twitter users on the SUL? 

I loved the idea -- it's my favorite kind of investigative reporting, because it involves programming.  

Thanks to the Twitter API, it was actually possible to write a crawler that: 

1. Generates a ranked list of who they follow and 

2. Highlights the ones who are on the SUL. 

I've written and run that crawler and the lengthy table on this page provides the result: 

http://scripting.com/sul/twitterCorp.html  

You can judge for yourself who influences the people of Twitter, and how that in turn influences the SUL.  

There's a wealth of other information in the table, I've already spent a couple of hours pondering it, but it's time to share it with everyone else, and see what you all come up with.  

Also thanks to Tom Reynolds for getting me the contents of the SUL late last night in response to a query I posted on Twitter. I didn't know where to find it, and it turns out it's hiding in plain sight on a page on twitter.com. 

Also note that people come on and off the SUL. So there are people with high follow counts who are not on the list, who were at one time.  

Update #1: There are four accounts on the SUL that have 0 followers at Twitter: Ali_Nejad, AstrobiologyNAI, LIVESTRONGCEO, PEOPLEPets. 

Update #2: Who do the people of the NY Times follow?