On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:43 PM, TjL <[email protected]> wrote: > > My favorite part of TwitReports is the "Follower Crossover" information: > > Assume a user "Joe" and a user "Ed". > > Ed follows Joe. > > Joe might want to know > > 1) Does anyone I follow also Ed? > > 2) Who else does Ed follow that I also follow? > > 3) Who is following both of us? > > is there a web site out there which shows this information already if > I put in two Twitter names? > > Don't want to reinvent the wheel :-)
Yes, you probably don't, unless you just want to do it occasionally. I'm working on some graph manipulations like that... the challenge is that Twitter is so open that the graphs are enormous for many people. This isn't a very hard problem on a small scale, but generalizing it looks like it will take a lot of resources. A relational database falls down very fast on this kind of analysis. For example, I have more than 300 followers, which is a simple query... but it returns 300 users and now the query needs to ask who the followers of those 300 are, to answer question No. 1. That's a big, slow query, since it has to specify the ids of the 300 that I follow... or it is 300 smaller queries. Either way, ugh. That query is going to return a very large number of items, many of which need to be compared with one another. So... I'm also curious who else is working on social graph problems. Also... show of hands, please... who else would use this kind of capability if it were available? I may be able to come up with resources to make it happen. Nick
