as a matter of fact, hubspots also has http://website.grader.com

So Twitter’s purpose was never ment to be discussing or haveing global conversations. It was ment to be your “chit-chat zone”, it was ment to give chance to stay in contact with your mates. But not in an active communicating, not in a discussing way but in a passive, superficial way.

Hence, _if_ there is a certain “value” of users on Twitter, it’s not their interacting, discussion-provoking and magniloquent style of beeing, but their relaxed way how they make their mates listen to them on this social network.
I agree, “when Twitter is treated like a distribution mechanism for a user to push messages to fans, the user loses value”, like in your real social world, some people talk to loads of people but don’t say anything interesting, some to little but great things. And here we are.

The value of a Twitter user is at the end the value of what he posts. So like there are different interests, there are different expectations and so different values for one and the same person. You _can_ messure the value of a Twitter user, but you can messure it only for yourself, with no claim to be valid for otherones too.

Thus, the social value of a person on Twitter (or any social network, really) is a measure of how many important people follow you, as well as the importance of the people you follow.

You might also be able to look at this as a graph-distance problem: what is the coverage of the total number of users from the account to be measured, and the average/mean/median/weighted average distance from the account to the most distant.

The latter could be called the “Kevin Bacon number” of Twitter.

Of course, the real measure is simply impact. From what I understand, Ze Frank is the person behind the tribalization of the Twitter groups. I’m not following him, nor is he following me, but the impact is clearly felt. Very similarly, Scott Sigler’s upcoming launch of his novel “Infected” has made a very significant impact — at least in my corner of the twitterati.

Ah, and thus is exposed another question: is Twitter really a “grouping of groups” (or “collection of niches”) or is there more structure to it? Does Milgram’s experiment have some similarity in the twitterati?

Heh.. reminds me of some research I was working on a couple of years ago.. I should re-run some of my analysis on twitter, perhaps..