Twiangulate: a bird’s eye view of Twitter

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.

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.